Photos

Sometimes, I take photos of people and actually capture a rare moment in time:

shucking oysters 

So hungry!

I haven't been taking many photos as of late, but that is going to change. There is something beautiful about capturing a moment locked in time- expressions of people, emotions, beauty and forever trapping seconds and making them permanent.

A more visual old, display can be found here: Old, but beautiful

Movement

These are the strange, wonderful days that happen too far in-between.  Life becomes lulled by redundancy, predictability, aided and coddled by routine. 

The Las Vegas airport looks as if it were the basis for the first season, some sort of B—grade cable-going pilot episode of a Sopranos spinoff. There are brightly colored neon lights surrounding the top of a faded soft pink wooded ceiling, curvy cursive blue and red neon letters spelling “cocktail lounge” and “Las Vegas Restaurant and Bar.” There are pockets of noisy, gold and white gambling machines with the old pull down levers. There is patterned blue and pink carpeting worn from foot traffic. This is a place of movement; it is the grey area that exists solely to give meaning to the destination. And.  It is in the middle of the  beautiful Nevada desert’s nothingness and open space. 

For some reason, in-between the coming and  the going, the goodbyes and hellos, the escapism and reality, I feel good about where I am. There is a lot to be vocalized about America, and for some reason, the glow of the slot machines in the afternoon December Nevada sun, comfort me. I am supposed to be here, and no where else right now, living in the grey, the in between. I am movement. 

Ownership

A while back, I wrote a post about the things we own and what they say about who we are. I'd like to add a little twist and add some photos of the things others own.

This one was taken quickly, so the quality isn't great. I found the idea of a vintage clock from the 40's, paired with a WWII calendar and a bottle opener with japanese writing on it, an odd, eclectic and confusing pairing.

Waste Land

“Do I dare 

Disturb the universe? 

In a minute there is time 

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” 

T.S Elliot 

Recently, I watched “Waste Land” a documentary about art, artistic production of everyday objects and classism in Brazil. I was more than hesitant to watch this film, but I was intrigued by the idea of creating art through everyday material.  More so, I was interested in how art was created out of waste.

 I am always hesitant on the bourgeoisie idea of the poor. The movie ends and I have vague lingerings of  exploitation in their lifestyles.  There are always prevalent underlying themes of how “they” are primitive and less modern than “us." All I truly desire is an honest depiction of life. Beautiful art=honesty.   In my view, this is subtly disguised as an outsiders (usually a white Westerner) appreciation of a different way of life. And then we sit.  We judge. We make life in our comfortable homes and privileged lifestyles and become a voyeur to another’s life for a brief hour and half then go about our daily lives.

I went in expecting something to that effect. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised and happy that I spent the time to watch this movie. In fact, the ideas and people actually emotionally reached me in a way I did not expect.

This documentary is note worthy for a variety of reasons. In one manner, there is the artistic production and involvement of the people in the making of the pieces, the subtle introspective nature on Brazil’s poverty and class system, the idea of human’s wasteful nature and  strong bond of humanism. The people were not exploited in their poverty, they were part of the process of the art. From the art, they grew, and as a the viewer, we grow too.

And most importantly, there is the idea of art as a mechanism for change in a tangible artistic and humanitarian manner. Vik Muniz did something very powerful, for not only the viewer, but for the people and objects he was capturing. This harmonious relationship can be seen in the art itself, and to me, it is incredibly profound and powerful.

© Vik Muniz  

© Vik Muniz  

© Vik Muniz  

All this was created from this:

© msnbc

It's Time For Change

Under Construction.

Please bear with me while I take some time to redesign, re-edit and reacquaint myself with the creative direction I want my blog to take.

It will be more focused, more creative and well, hopefully more reflective of what I desire a blog to be,   such as artistic expression, daily musings and whatever else feels good.

 Here are some things to get us started:

this video's humorous undertone and mute colors make it one of my favorites for 2011.

Rebirth

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
-Victor Hugo

Moment of The Day:

Blanket statement:

I take solace in momentary happiness. In fact, to me, it represents some of the most  beautiful things in life.

Blanket statment's example/my momentary beauty of the day:

I'm serving a man with a thick french accent some sort of coffee drink I don't understand. I wing making some espresso and put in some foam and pour it over drip coffee. I hand it to him and smile. I'm not sure what he asked for, but I think this is right. 

He looks at it and says, "I asked for room for air" and takes the drink and pours some of it out on the floor in front of the espresso bar. Let me repeat this. He puts the cup out in front of him and pours out some coffee on to the floor.

I immediately think of this clip:

And begin laughing.

 I can't help it.

He then tells me he likes to smell the aroma of the coffee. Or something along those lines. His English is broken, Frank Sintra is blaring and I can barely understand him. He then says, "The smell gets me high." This is a sentence I understood completely.


He looks around very cautiously, as if what he is about to tell me is extremely secretive. "In fact," he says, "I don't need the coffee to make me high at all" and he starts laughing hysterically. He then slips me a napkin with his phone number on it, winks and walks away.

None of my coworkers saw this happen and I quietly tucked the napkin away in my apron.

-----------
Coming soon:
The role of the photographer in the picture of a subject. Or: First World Dominance in the Representation of the Somalian Famine. 

The Things We Own.

He must of acquired it second hand, none of it looked new. But all the pieces shared a kind of sympathy, and the fact that they were suffocating under papers and books made them more attractive than less. 

-Nicole Krauss "Great House"

What does the furniture you surround yourself by say about who you are? 

I ask this because recently I have been missing things I left in my old home.  I've tried hard not to become attached to things. I live in a small efficiency apartment and most of my possessions are books and clothes. I don't like feeling attached to things.  However, despite this, I'm missing things I left back at home. 

These things, all family antique furniture  traveled with me through three different houses in college, across the state of Washington twice and were in my room all through middle and high school . They have history, not just my history, but the history of my family and where I came from.  Now, these things are sitting in my mom's basement collecting dust. 

When I moved I thought it would be cathartic and symbolic to leave the old and begin fresh by making new. Now I realize that the past shapes the future in a way that you will never escape. See: Nostalgia. idolization of a past that never existed

The things I own show you who I am now.

You find a slew of new-to-me used furniture. Each piece was either given to me or found on the side of the road and refurnished by me. I do not have ties to the furniture.  I have no history to the pieces, and in a way, it is symbolic of the life I live. Everything in my life is new.

I miss being surrounded by history, my history. My desk was my grandmother's in the 1940's when she was a substitute in an elementary school and my dresser was my great-grandfathers.  Every night before bed,  he wrote a list of tomorrow's activities and left it on the top of the desk. I have a large globe that was  made just after WWII that  sat in my Grand Uncle's living room surrounded by shelves and shelves of books. These things have meaning outside of the life I live now, but they are also connected to who I am and where I came from.

My free-to-me-table, my redone dresser, re-furnished chairs and bookshelves still have some sort of life, or history to live. However, while everything in life still feels new, I suppose it would be comforting to have a reminder of the past, a gentle reminder that who you are now is directly linked to where you came from. 

Tuesday's Two great songs of the day:

Or Perfection: Narrative Flow in Songwriting

After a long day out in the sun looking at strange plants, getting lost in the Home Depot, (hey, it happens), rummaging through thrift stores and going into rolling hills of Texan nature at sunset, I give you:

Tuesday's Two great songs of the day:

Silver Jews, "Random Rules"


Standout Lyrics
there's no guidance when random rules
and
I know that a lot of what I say has been lifted off of men's room walls.
Maybe I've crossed the wrong rivers and walked down all the wrong halls.


The Mountain Goats, "The Recognition Scene"







Regardless if you personally agree with the sound of these songs, they both represent strong, narrative songwriting. They contain beautiful symbolism with simple sentence structure. I've learned it is easy to make a complex sentence or idea sound beautiful, but constructing a simple, short sentence is much more difficult (1), but also, to me personally, much more beautiful. Ideas do not have to be expressed with complication.  Most things we experience, feel and know as humans can be said with rather simplistic tonality.

These two songs are two such examples. They both are simple in their construction, but very beautiful.


Ironic Footnote:
(1) Even in regards to artistic value of beauty, writing about what qualifies and quantifies 'beauty' or 'taste' becomes increasingly difficult in written expression. Just google Kant's Judgment of taste (universality vs. subjectivity) Interested?
 See:
Kant's aesthetic-judgment
To symbolically convolute this idea even farther, you have artistic production becoming something allows art to be mass produced, and thus seen, to many artists/consumers at the turn of the industrial revolution, and the rise of the capitalistic market,  a means of  creation for "less" beauty.  There are many of the same; the product lacks originality, and thus, craftsman ship, and thus, beauty.

See: 

Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Think print making- or in Benjamin's case, mass production of furniture.

However, while the criticism of art/music remains difficult to define, the expression of the human condition, the camera obscura of life- is not. We all live, we all die, and the moments spent between those two extremes, we all have universal experiences as humans. This in itself is quite simple.

Return of the Rabble Rouser. Part one.

I’ve been too busy living life the past 6 months to actually write about it. I know, I know. I’m sorry. For those of you who started reading my blog, clinging to vain hopes that it would be ridiculous, full of sass and most importantly, full of rabble rousing, I apologize.  The boring  stops here.

I believe there are two ways to experience life. You can simply exist in it or you can live it. I always try to do the latter. And, I hope you do too.

Rabble Rouse away.

Let’s talk about the time I ran away from Austin on my 24^th birthday with my two friends in a yellow 2001 VW Beetle and we made it rain (dollar bills) on Bourbon Street.

(Sorry Mom. Sorry Dad. Sorry potential future career as a public figure…)

I hate birthdays, I hate expectation and most of all, I hate time. Time, will always be an all controlling factor that will eventually have its way with me. So, I ran away. I ran away from the idea of time, my new found friends, expectation of another year passing and a new city’s familiarity. We drove 10 hours through East Texas highway and swamp and arrived in New Orleans. We set our belongings down at the hostel and pulled a 20 hour day.

 I didn’t know my birthday would coincide with Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I didn’t know this was the Pre-College Mardi Gras; Mardi Gras for those tourist with both change and time to spare, Mardi Gras for a crowd in their mid30’s to late 60’s. A Mardi Gras for party animals that crawled out of America’s woodwork and did a mass Exodus to NOLA.

Fastforward 4 hours later, to public-drinking-sipping cheap beer waiting for a night parade.

My friends and I have an uncanny ability to make friends easily. Along the stretch of hot downtown street, waiting for the parade, we meet a couple from D.C. An unmarried, happy couple. The man is clearly drunk- wasted really, the woman works for the post office and is obviously the stable, rational one in the relationship. They buy us beer, ask us about our lives and in return, we ask about theirs. A simple of exchange of beverages and stories, except it seems like so much more. 

Let me tell you something- telling people you teach always ends well. Telling people you work for a nonprofit ends even better. They offer more beer and begin to tell us about both of their bitter divorces. They tell us about how they refuse to marry, and how they come to NOLA during Mardi Gras every year.  I sip on my bud light in the street. My friends and I converse about life, love and making a living.  The conversation is interrupted by a man who, at first, I mistake for Rick Ross type. Stop. I know you’re sensitive about race, but he had the body type, the face, and the unique haircut.

Rick tells us he is an author. He points to his hot girlfriend named Stacy. He pulls out a wad of Benjamin’s. He tells us how he won all this at the casino down the road, as he points. He tells us how he went to jail.  He tells us how he writes about his experiences on the street and how his girlfriend is a poet. He slaps his girlfriend on the ass and asks us how old we think she is.  The parade is going on the background, and I’m drunk. (Sorry Mom. Sorry Dad. Sorry potential future career as a public figure…) I’m afraid to answer. Turns out it is her birthday. She’s 40, but looks hardly 32. As my friend would say, “Black don’t crack, sorry you white women are screwed.”

There are more floats, more color, more noise.  But, I am fascinated by the unmarried white couple from the east coast, the black couple from New Jersey, the wad of 100 bills and the throwing of shiny beads by people dressed in voodoo costumes. In a way, I feel like a bystander to a crazy mishmash of people, stories, lives and somewhat exploited culture and tradition.

The parade ends, and Rick invites us to go to Bourbon Street with him. So we do. At this point, I realize I am the only white person between 6 people and we are buying drinks at clubs like I’ve never been too.  There are women in bras, women in booty shorts and I feel like I’m in a rap video as soon as there is an ass shaking contest on stage. Rick buys more drinks for us. 

And we dance. We dance. And we dance. I go to the bathroom where a nice black women sitting by the sink offers me soap and a hand towel in exchange for a tip. I’m in the South. Holy Shit, I am in the South.

I go back out to dance.  I look up and out of nowhere I see dollar bills fluttering their way down from the balcony onto the dance floor like oversized, overpriced confetti.

Who is making it rain? Mr. Author-Rick Ross-Baus. He is standing on the balcony pushing the money out of his hand with a swift motion; he watches the wave of green ripple its way down. I stand back and watch the flurry of people bend over to pick up the cash and stuff it into their pockets like animals.

Rabble Rousing.

Blog Plug:

http://victualsense.wordpress.com/

My friend started a food blog. She's a creative writing grad from Rhodes and her writing about food definitely contains a little bit of wit. And, she's Southern, but definitely not the Paula Dean type.

But, most importantly, she also cooks me dinner. Living alone causes me to live like a bachelor.

Take a look!

Catch that phrase! Gramma-ah freaa-kay.

 The following conversation aptly describes my new found unemployment. Luckily, I have friends who speak the same text speak and are currently without a  j-o-b. Now, I have a new found appreciation for text communication and lack-of-grammar. Remind me to thank Texas for that one.

Here is a conversation that ensued between him and I, bringing on my new favorite phrase of the summer,  "finding them sexies"

-
"Yo yo- what you doin tonight?"

"Beasting through my book. I know, I know-  I'm a regular par-tay animal."

"Ok well, we hangin later this week"


"chey-ah. Can we have  have foodstamp potlucks? And then dance it off?"

"Yeah, I'd be down. To eat. And dance." 


"Legit! You, sir, have a deal."

"And, you know, finding them sexies."


"I'd be down for finding myself one of them sexies...haha"

"Deal. Food. Dance. Finding them sexies."

Aside from the horrible grammar and spelling phonetics, I couldn't help but laugh and secretly hope this phrase catches on.

Sidenote: The last time I went dancing at this place they played footage of the KKK while playing soul music. Sober, and stunned, I had my first cigarette in a year, and discussed weaves and the proper jargon for San Antonio, which, apparently,  is Say-town, or San Antone. Weaves, are another story.

Animated Art.

The NY Times blogger/author Jeff Scher did a great Op/Ed piece that included animated art about his son Buster. The film is has a contrasting dichotomy of displaying parental POV, but also very childlike in it's quality and aesthetic. 

You Might Remember This
I think its a shining example of the digital medium and artistic production, with fractured small fragments composing the whole memory.

"I will remember them all, having now engraved them in memory with crayon, paint and pencil."


I am continuously fascinated by the idea of truth, representation of subjective reality and the evolution of memories over time. I think this follow-up piece is wonderfully composed, a view of a child's life through a father's eyes. Also, Happy Father's Day. Now, maybe, you should call your father...

BOom Boom.

Summer Reads
Or It Already Feels like July...

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

Thomas Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow 

Michel Foucault This is Not a Pipe

My airplane read:


Sara Gruen Water for Elephants


And my "re-reads"


Herman Hesse Steppenwolf


Mark Z. Danielewski House of Leaves




Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet






Maybe possible unemployment and living alone has a bright side...
  

Restored Working Habits.

Having spent the last two years working in the public sector, mainly the public school system (ranging from Elementary to University), is, by far the most challenging thing I have ever done. College was a sweet summer breeze in comparison to the long hours, little pay, the disproportionate number of students:me, demands of a collapsing school system, undocumented students politic, and well, working in a strange melting pot of race where I continually am too hyper-aware of my own race, my own racial baggage as a white female going into a school composed almost entirely of Hispanics and African-Americans.

It is one thing to read about the system, it is another thing entirely to experience it.

However, one of my students gave me a card, and inside, there was a scribbled letter that read,

"I've had an amazing time with you this year. I can't tell you how thankful I am to have met you. I needed the 'realist' point of view you have given me. I really have loved connecting with you these past couple months. I know we will always talk through my college years. I hope to always keep in touch.


"ps. I will never forget you because you have truly made a great impact on my life"


I guess, I would say, working in the public sector sucks, for a lack of a better term.  It's not a lucrative career for someone in their mid-twenties trying to get their feet on the ground monetarily, have a life outside of work, try and maintain a social network.  And with recent budget cuts, the jobs are slim pickings and incredibly competitive.

Regardless, I love my job, which is something that I know most people my age cannot say. I work hard, and I deal with an incredible firing of stressors. However, at the end of the day, it's all worth it and it feels good.

As I leave this industry, I have no idea how to operate in a regular job that doesn't serve the public or work on youth advocacy. I don't know how I am going to sit in a cubicle, make copies, merge excel spreadsheets, answer phones...or just have a job that pays me, just because it pays me. It all just seems so selfish and hollow. I wish everyone post-graduate could of had a two years of rewarding and internally fulfilling job. And, I know this sounds, but the experience in itself alters the way you view wage labor, worker's rights, public funding, large governmental systems and becomes a shining example  of all that 'crazy' social theory you spent four years learning.

I love Texas

but Texas will never be home.

As the weather already starts to reach the upper 90's and I prepare myself for four straight months of hot, humid sticky days, I can't help but start to miss Washington.

For the following reason:

Lake Roosevelt 

 I spent every summer on this lake up until this point and this will be the first summer since I was 10 that I won't go boating here. As it heats up, I can already tell I will be yearning for mid-80's pleasant temperatures, pristine blue water to ski on. 

The Art of Things

I moved across the country with my car full of nothing but the essentials. No trailer, no truck, just a  a gray Ford Taurus with the trunk full to the brim, backseat packed and a bike rack. 2,300 miles of open road and nothing but the belongings in my car.

I'm moving again, (my fourth move in three years) and this time, I don't want a lot of stuff. Suffice to say, I have not had the opportunity to gain a lot of material things. My job only allows for me to live on the bare essentials, but it's been a positive life change.

But, as I'm packing going through all my old belongings, I am throwing them away.

Elizabeth Bishop, in her very famous poem, wrote about the ease of losing important things. As I'm losing important material possessions, I like to think I'm gaining new experience through some sort of minimalist living.

I don't need a lot, I desire excess, but I suppose that is the American mindset. Still, I will only have 10 boxes of things, and for that, I am really happy.

Brief moment in Time

Beirut.

2005 was a solid year for music. It was my graduating year of high school and I like that it was such a strong year for independent music. The Shins, The Flaming Lips, Le Tigre, Sleater Kinney’s last years, The Decembrists, Neko Case, Beck, Queens of the Stone Age, Nada Surf, Rogue Wave, The Tragically Hip (sometimes), Band of Horses… Yeah, I’m looking directly at you Sasquatch music festival ’06…

Let’s take a brief moment for nostalgia:













However worn Converse aside--

I’ve realized one album that continuously becomes overlooked and shadowed by hipsters and music critics alike is Beirut’s Gulag Orkestrar. And I admit, usually in my blogs I try and let the music critics and hipsters create posts about music. It is, after all, their one area of confidence and safe haven. They do it better.



Creating arguments for “good” art is a slippery slope, from Kant to Ruskin, to some modernist popular artist commercialized mixed media… art is not something that is tangible, logical and easy to prove. Creating an argument? Sure. Platonic critiques on binary organization on art’s worth to society? Kant’s judgment on the aesthetic? Not so much. And, in fact, this very subjective interpretation is what makes art beautiful.
Beauty is any particular thing to any particular person.

However, with all this, I can say, Gulag Orkestrar is just too great to be lost in the times of dusty record shelves and old mixtapes. The entire album goes beyond just being music. This music is based of a genre that attempts to bring fractured people together.

I was introduced to this album by someone who had a strong attachment to gypsy music and Balkan Brass. Much of the point of this type of music isn’t to be “good”, but rather, to bridge social, economic and cultural gaps.

Case in point:




This is what solidified Gulag Orkestrar as a means of successful artistic expression. Not only does the entire album sustain itself in versatility and musical talent, but so much of Condon’s live performances are about making the audience feel something similar and universal.

The Rise of the Overeducated Underclass

My dad recently visited town and he added a subtle reminder that I will be 25 in six months. For some reason, this struck a hard chord. It made me uncomfortable. With age, come­ societal expectations set up by older generations. Older generations with an idea of  working America that no longer exists.

 Post-graduate life has been hard, especially since I hit the job market running when the economic stability resembled a mild great-depression. My life greatly resembles the article, “Educated, Unemployed and Frustrated” (NY Times, Op/Ed)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/opinion/21klein.html

While driving in the car today with a friend down a winding two lane Texas highway, I realized my generation might, and probably will be,  the first generation that makes less money than our parents. We were raised with the expectations of the 90's, a time of prosperous growth, social complacency and the boom of the Internet. 

I now know this working America is gone. I am not sure how to navigate a society that does not foster and grow with young, hard working, educated, intelligent individuals. But, regardless, I feel for most of my friends who are graduating college and entering the fierce, unforgiving shackles of the work-a-day world.

However, for me, graduating college five months after the banking crisis and the housing collapse has definitely put a unique perspective on the ideology of working, of economic stability, and what it means to be a young educated person in America.  

http://money.cnn.com/news/storysupplement/economy/recession_depression/

Today I out ran this storm:

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;

Robert Frost "Reluctance" 

I think it's odd that people can begin to exist in the immaterial realm.

...

web 2.0 bring people together or allowing a facade of existence apart?



flight of the conchords first season--- so good.

Urban Exploration

Carrot Rope

The 90's, a time where men could use a tarp as a backdrop, wear oversized raincoats in sun and awkwardly dance.

'

These days of complacency are gone, but things like this remind me of it's existence.

I don’t know what it is. But. I stumble upon people who share incredible pieces of their lives with me, and many of them, I only see for a couple hours (or less). They soon become swallowed whole by the world and I never see them again. And, there I am, left with a small fracture of who they are and I wonder why they tell me these things in the first place.

Dave: A counter-cultural 20-something poet from a suburb outside of Houston. Along the way of stop-and-go Austin traffic, he tells me about the love of his life, a blind performance poet living in St. Louis. She performs her work, without ever seeing the reaction of an audience. She is an Atheist Muslim, who writes about the neo-empirical forms of race-relations and identity.  We talk about court-ship and expression of love. He believes that people’s expression of love should not just be through sex, as he sees it only as a momentary act of pleasure. He believes the most intimate moments two people can share is complete honesty, openness and vulnerability. He then tells me that this woman he loves, will never love him back. At this point, we are at our destination, I smile and he steps out of my car and I drive away.

Tantra-Zawadi: A fierce woman who lives in Brooklyn. I spent the morning attending a workshop on multi-media artistic expression that she took part in. Tantra is an advocate for HIV/AIDS awareness, and travels throughout the country reading her poetry, screening her movie and advocating for HIV/AIDS prevention.

And, this guy:

Who, after his performance, told me that the only reason he really writes is because it is the only thing that makes sense to him surrounded by chaos. 

Google: is it Making Us Stupid?

It is no secret that I am a self-prescribed, paradoxical postmodernist. I have been struggling with  the idea of the Internet, the differing forms of reality and what makes these varying degrees of reality "more real"- or valid than one another-
Along the way:

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Re-post (because it is that good)


And
"Meditations on First Cybersophy"-Bill Pena

Seinfeld- A View on life

I have a very kind of Seinfeld life. It has a lot of somethings, but eventually, they all result in a lot of nothing. Over time, character builds and hilarity ensues.

For those of you who don’t know, I was in a car accident a month and half ago. Four cars, actually, rear-ended, a sort-of-almost-defying- physics on a rain-slicked Texan highway. This chain reaction was instigated by an irrational New York driver, at 50 mph as the highway split. In a swift kick of irony, I rear-ended my best friend. After many tears, shock, cops and seeing the car, my car, driven from Washington--> Texas completely obliterated, I climbed into her bruised and battered, ’03 Ford Focus, the car that I rear-ended.

We stopped at a gas station so I could ice my wrist, the only injury I received, with frozen popsicles (ice wrist: then eat, of course this made sense!) And as a stubborn act of defiance, we drove Mr. Catfish, a Soul/Creole, and restaurant on the East side of un-gentrified Austin, as originally planned.

Silently, I ate my fried catfish, red beans and rice. I stared at the fossilized form of an alligator head on the wall, and looked out the barred windows outside to see people hanging out under the tree at the vacant lot next door. I realized, that if there is a God, and he/she/it exists, and they wanted me to be dead, I would be. I stared down at my now swollen wrist, and realized the cuts resemble a deep suicide attempt.

Since then, I have fallen in love with my bike, Penny Lane. I have joined a non-profit board with Austin Poetry Society, been accepted to amazing graduate schools, received scholarships and found time to take photos with my awesome garage sale find, a $5.00 accidental-light leak 35m camera. And, most importantly, I have learned the value and freedom of individual movement that a car brings.

Penny Lane <3

Like the previous post before, to me, there is nothing more freeing than the transitory time between one point and another, where you are not bound to obligation. And, like a Seinfeld episode, it is going this post is going to end abruptly and without a concise resolution. The following episode includes: A thick accented Ukrainian, the internet, Better Business Bureau and Kmart.


Blogs to come:
-Gentrification and marginalization of minorities, or How Everyone and Their Mom is Moving to Austin, Texas.

The open road and movement forward, from one point to another represent the grey area, the transitory beauty in the time-in-between, the intricate façade of the momentary lapse of time where you are not bound tightly to obligations, responsibilities, places or people. 

The open road is freedom. And it is movement. And it is rebirth. It is all of these things, and to me, it has become the purest form of individual freedom.

**

Very recently, my friends and I had a road trip to New Orleans.  I spent 10 hours in a car through an East Texan sunrise, weaving my way through I-10E, built on top of swampland and eventually ending up in a city comprised largely of non-conforming vagabonds. 

I spent much of my time wandering throughout parts of the city away from Downtown and Uptown. The more I roamed the streets, the more I realized that the town itself is one large clustering juxtaposition in transition and rebuilding.

There are abandoned, vacated homes scattered on almost every block.  Some have chipping paint,  and some have windows and doors are covered with cheap plywood two blocks away from multi-million dollar old plantation homes.  This became a symbol of wealth distribution and classism for me that weaved its way into my entire trip.

I guess, after a lot of time, New Orleans, to me,  is simply going through a stage of rebirth. The city is reforming it's identity and  ideology. It is figuratively experiencing the time of movement, progression, of not being bound to obligation or responsibility, and of change. 

However, this open road for the city isn't a smooth beautiful Texan sunrise, or an elaborate highway infrastructure built on swampland. It is an aggressive in your-face reminder of all the mistakes that were made Post-Katrina. At the same time, I saw the city itself, desperately tried to distance itself from it's painful past and discover new ways of creating a sense of self.  

Coming Soon...

Exploring the idea of rebirth: