miley cyrus and the circus

http://tressiemc.com/2013/08/27/when-your-brown-body-is-a-white-wonderland/

we're looking into a vortex of information, looking at something and standing next to others, pointing into the vortex, did you see this, look. facing our screens. functions have changed.  images used to be and are sometimes taken because no one had/has seen the image.  now there are so many images, only few show us something we have never seen.  now the act of taking a picture is to say some other version of I was here and this is me. 

I need to remember this:

Tilda Swinton's dinner speech at the opening of David Bowie is.

Dear Dave

When I asked you if you wanted me to say anything here tonight

You said 'Only three words, one of them testicular..'

So i'll pass that on

Here I am at surely the most eclectic of all the London branches of Bowie Anonymous
All the nicest possible freaks are here

We're in the Victoria and Albert Museum preparing to rifle through your drawers
It's truly an amazing thing

This was my favourite playground as a child
Medieval armour : my fantasy space wear

And, alongside, when I was 12 - and a square sort of kid in a Round Pond sort of childhood, not far from here - I carried a copy of Aladdin Sane around with me - a full 2 years before i had the wherewithal to play it

The image of that gingery boney pinky whitey person on the cover with the liquid mercury collar bone was - for one particular young moonage daydreamer - the image of planetary kin, of a close imaginary cousin and companion of choice

It's taken me a long time to admit, even to myself, let alone you, that it was the vision and not yet the sound that
hooked me up - but if i can't confess that here and now, then when and where?

We all have our own roots
And routes
To this room

Some of us - the enviable - found the fellowship early in the funfests of Billy's Bowie Nights
or equivalent lodges from San Francisco to Aukland to Heidelberg and all points in between

For others, it was a more lonesome affair, paced out in a sort of private morse code like following bread crumbs through a forest

I'm not saying that if you hadn't pitched up I would have worn a pie crust collar and pearls like some of those I went to school with
I'm not saying that if you hadn't weighed in, Princess Julia would have been less inventive with the pink blusher
Simply that, you provided the sideways like us with such rare and out-there company
Such fellowship
You pulled us in and left your arm dangling over our necks
And kept us warm - as you have for - isn't it ? - centuries now
You were
You are
One of us

And you have remained the reliable mortal in amongst all the immortal shapes you have thrown

Nothing more certain than changes

Always with a weather eye out
Always awake and clocking the fallout

Those Mayans must have known something when they set their calendar down before
January 2013

Because, of course, now all bets are off

I know, because you told me, how tickled you were to knock Elvis - for once! - out of the headlines on your shared birthday this year

There's so much for all of us to be happy about since then

Yet, I think the thing I'm loving the most about the last few weeks
is how clear it now is - how undeniable - that the freak becomes the great unifier
The alien is the best company after all
For so many more than the few

They wanted a Bowie fan to speak tonight. They could have thrown a paper napkin and hit a hundred.
I'm the lucky one, standing up to speak for all my fellow freaks anxious to win the pub quiz and
claim their number one most super-fan tshirt

I want to give thanks to the Victoria and Albert Museum for indulging us so
For laying on our dream show

For showing us - look at their advance ticket sales - that , as is
written along the bottom of this months Q magazine,
'why we all live in David's world now'

To Gucci and Sennheiser for putting up the cash, laying on the sound and vision
To Geoffrey and Victoria for curating an entire universe so beautifully, on behalf of us all

When I think of what it used to feel like once
To be a freak who liked you
To feel like a freak like you
- a freak who even looked a little like you

And then I think of the countless people of every size and feather who are going to walk through this trace of your journey here and pick up the breadcrumbs
in the great hub of this mothership over these Spring and Summer months..

And how familiar and stamped you are into ALL of our our collective DNA

I'm just plain proud

So

Where are we now?

Well
I know you aren't here tonight, but
Somehow, no matter

We are -
And you brought us out of the wainscotting like so many
Freaky old bastards
Like so many fan boys and girls
Like so many loners and pretty things and dandies and dudes and dukes and duckies and testicular types
And pulled us together

Together
By you
Dave Jones
Our not so absent, not so invisible, friend

Every alien's favourite cousin
Certainly mine

We have a nice life

Yours aye

Tilly

what a great site specific public art project.

i forgot that i was tired.  i forgot that i forgot.  i fussed over a bag and had someone make it for me, and i fell in love with the idea of the woman making the bag and i let her make it and i finally picked the bag up, carried it off, went to R's house and modeled it,  put it across my shoulder and realized that its impractical in that the zipper is on the wrong side. sort of fundamentally impractical.  i wondered what i've been doing these past few visits with this woman besides gushing over a neighborly connection, which was really just nervous conversation for the point of being neighborly but mostly an exchange of goods and smiles.  noticing the zipper was wrong felt sort of monumental, like wondering how i could have missed the whole point of the thing, the bag. the bag.  i guess that wasn't the fundamental thing. i wanted to buy something from someone I really liked.  the bag is mostly right, but it is also a good thing because it will remind me of a sunny exchange i guess. oh well.  r said to me last night, in my despair over the mistake, its ok, you will soon remember that its an object and you can objectify it.  it felt like an appropriate revelation to have.

Zentai 

chaos magic theory says that belief can be an active magical force. It emphasizes flexibility of belief and the ability to consciously choose one's beliefs, hoping to apply belief as a tool rather than seeing it as a relatively unchanging part of one's personality.

Anapolis
Feb 3 1961

Dear Charles

Another goodbye - another unhappy moment - thank you for coming into the city.  What we have is rare. A million people search and do not find what we have stumbled across -

Read John Donne then you may know about what I speak - Never loose your sensitivity - for that is what makes us valuable as people.

I am very tired, I did not sleep on the bus and I was on watch till 12p.m.

Sweeter than the sticky sweet - which sickens and disgusts - is the bittersweet.  Without the sadness and lonliness that I can't help feeling you wouldn't be half so valuable to me.

yours sincerely and unhappily happy
Michael

send me your picture

pushmepullyou fingerpoint back
oneyearn oneyear twosteps crack
twistinground turning ground
where do we go
spinmeup spinmedown
nobody knows

thinking of a friends post and this idea that she brought up, i have too.  this question that pops up for me when I'm in some kind of place.  the idea that i will never be more than my mother's daughter, another way of saying that I'm really just my mother.  what of the essential things that are left like the last few broken strings on a guitar that only play one song, the same song for all of eternity.  reduced to the essential that feels essentially untruthful and also, like whining. more like whining the older i get.  is this my dying song?  is this my family's eternal dying song?  what is its function?  

honey, keys, phone, luke warm tea a third full.  df wallace this morning for the first time talking about the wind in the midwest.  playing tennis in tornados.  Its raining in los angeles.  I would say it rains in los angeles, but it doesnt.  im happy for it.  there are great things about jetlag like getting up too early and having time to listen to records and read.  some things are too big to talk about, when it feels this way I'll go to the little things, honey, keys, tea and phone.

as usual starting is the first big hurdle of the day. sitting down to start work makes me feel like everything is else more important than it is, like updating this.  for who/  for what?  if I don't get more words in they might never come back.  for who?

reading the new yorkers summup about beyonce's supposed fakery of the national anthem. the assertion is that she mocked an authentic moment and pointed to the fakery of the whole thing.  it goes further to talk about the nature of "reality" as we call it these days.  Is the notion of truth and reality under fire?

the article does talk about the artifice of the internet, about reality television, and how it puts real people in faked situations to elicit real emotions, from themselves and the audience.  as a person who works in reality tv, I've thought about this a lot.  its caused me a lot of shame to make entertainment out of processing real lives.  why should I take part in the devaluing of "real"ness.  What is realness?

first light of los angeles sun peeking into the window invading my eye line turns everything gold, with so much green around things turn mustard, like the palm trees outside my window.  when I think about all the reasons i haven't spoken in so long, mostly they are my own, its also because of everything out there that i perceive is better, said better, more profoundly, I've stopped speaking in my own way because what could i know or feel.  green and yellow leaves are outside the window.  I wait for my tea and something else to happen today, hoping the traffic won't cloud me over into some sort of work zombie. all the familiar patterns are daunting.  i said i wouldnt waste any more time.

what is the myth of before and after?
what is the myth of cause and effect?

if we call moments events, and we call the existence of moments occurances, then they arrive as a a tear in the fabric, splitting reality, creating a before and an after.  is everything just a series of befores and afters? no. somehow this is wrong some of the time.

I will start here:
If the rain doesnt come
and the food doesnt grow
and the people go hungry
arent these just three ways of explaining the same thing, rather than causes and effects?

this is my mind today. full of nothing.