r & r

When the masseuse at wholefoods picks me up and cracks my neck while he moans "oh, minnesota" makes me feel both homesick and dirty.

So I am off to see how minnesota feels like in summer.

Have fun secret admirers.

reconciling the truth

(a photoless post because I would probably be fined for copyright infringement)

Believe me there was a time when photography was focused on something other than catching celebrities with Starbucks in hand. There was a time when photography exposed you to worlds never seen... ring elongated necks of the Masai, fish with no eyes, moments captured in ironic juxtapositions that helped you think about the world just a little differently.

Right now at the Getty is one of the best photography exhibits I have had the pleasure of seeing. Engaged Observers is a 200 piece exhibition of documentary photography that has a artist list that reads like a dream team of thought provoking masters.

It captures what it is like to be a adolescent girl (shout out to the girls getting ready for a dance in Edina, MN) exposes you to the corporate irresponsibility of the Chisso plant that wiped out residents of a fishing village in Japan by taking away their only way of life and to add salt to the wound crippled them physically, shows you the face of homeless children in Seattle, a and a German's view of the deep south and separation of the races pre-integration.

These are not pretty pictures, they make you speechless all the same.

The most controversial piece being James Nachtwey's 60 photo montage "The Sacrifice" a collection from a medi-vac unit in Iraq in 2006. My recommendation is to really visually digest these photos for yourself, all 60, step back and watch people for a while as they start computing images 1-8, they perhaps linger just a little more, before it becomes a little too much for them and they walk away. I think this is part of the experience of this piece. It is one thing to have an idea of something that is far far away in a distant land and it is another all together to see it. The blood, the tubes snaking from frame to frame, a hole in stomach, the concentration tinged with fear.

I guess I don't make it sound like the most uplifting sell of this show, but sometimes things aren't meant to lift you up, it is meant to take you in and chew you up a bit.

It is hard to reconcile the truth.

(now until November 12th)

digging around in your gray matter

In my life I seek collaborative experiences. Sometimes this blog is a collaborative space for you and I to interact in the cyber-sea. I know you are reading, I can see you. (Thanks Aodhan)

A question I posed a few weeks only resulted in one verbal yes on "Diary of a Mental Dominatrix" so it stays as is...

a MN girl in LA and other nonsense.

Thank you and keep reading secret admirers.

control

There is an exchange in one of my favorite movies of all time and echoed into another

Chow Mo-wan: In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn't want to share... you know what they did?
Ah Ping: Have no idea.
Chow Mo-wan: They went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud. And leave the secret there forever.

Lately I feel like this is my personal metaphor, I am that tree and I am a hollowed out woman.

Sometimes I am bogged down by other people's secrets, sometimes people do not have an inner monologue, sometimes people just want to share a lot, with me.

At times, this becomes too much. All these secrets I can't share floating around and staying my body. The only thing that I have felt that makes a difference in filling in my mud covered hollowness is this

Sometimes you need to figure things out without talking, sometimes you need someone there to keep you in the moment and to derail my propensity to wander off, and just when my mind goes to

unpaid bills..there is a hand on my forehead
the fear of a foster child taken away....there is a hand on my hand
the revealing of favoritism in a job consistently done wrong.. .there is a hand on my stomach
and the words of cesar moro playing over again...there is a hand on my knee

And at the end it is exactly what I needed. Visit her, she works wonders and one of the last people to make me feel unbridled joy.

(I also feel like the android hostess who has been at it too long and now has delayed emotion, but that is a story I know too well and is for another time.)

Bus blog-Good clear sound

I have noticed a lot more people speaking Nahuatl on the Sunset bus.