Quills & Frills - 5/31/2014

Aleathia says:

Well....here is where the Frills part comes in.  Frills can be anything entertainment related.  I won't profess to be very astute in my review of movies or any other art form.  I know what I like, but I don't always know why I like it.  I'm one of those girls that is big on feeling or being made to feel something.  The following is an opinion, nothing more.

Recently, Michael has been bringing more old movies home from the library and watching them on the computer while I spend my hours stitching. This week it has been Bogart and the myriad of ladies he has starred with.  The other day I saw he had Sabrina in the pile and got very excited.  I love Audrey Hepburn. There is something so elegant yet playful about her that has always drawn me to her.

When I was a young girl in high school I almost always watched old movies if I had the opportunity.  It isn't to say that I didn't see the current popular pictures of the time, but they always left me wanting something more.  I lived in a fantasy world filled with glamour girls and tried to learn the proper way to act from them since my mother was a bit of a wild child.  I loved the interaction between the actors in the old movies, the elegance, the classy scores, and above all the honesty and innocence of the performances.

My bedroom wall was plastered with black and white photographs of these Hollywood mavens.  I wanted to be like them.  I admired them and their skills.  So, while we were at the library this week getting more Bogart movies I found this book:

In this book there is every nominated film since 1927 through 2012.  It also has great photographs and stories about each awards night.  We plan on watching all the nominated films we can find and deciding if the winner deserved the golden statue.  It is going to be a great year of movie watching.

Art Bomb - 5/30/2014

 Ally says:

Jasper Johns: Regrets

March 15, 2014 – September 1, 2014

It’s cyclical – and you can feel that as soon as you enter the room.

Johns to Bacon to Freud.

I’m not sure what people will make of the MoMA’s latest exhibit, Jasper Johns: Regrets.

Mainly because it consists of only 10 drawings, two prints, and two paintings.

That’s it.

Let’s start with Jasper, himself. At 84 years of age has been producing work for nearly 60 years. And this latest exhibit includes what he has spent his time on during the last year and a half.

So what is that really?

What are these 10 drawings, two prints and two paintings of?

This:

That is a picture of Lucien Freud, the painter. It was taken by the photographer John Deakin for Francis Bacon, also a painter. Bacon is famous for things like this:

 

Three Studies of Lucian Freud

But his portraits all came from photos. He didn’t paint a single portrait from life, instead, buried in his filthy amazing studio he painted from photos. 

And in doing so, he ruined them – wrinkled them, ripped them, bent them, tacked them to things, splattered paint all over them. And when he was finished he dropped them on the floor and moved on. Francis Bacon was not one for sentimentality.

In 2012, Johns got his hands on that photo of Freud and spent a year and half recreating it. And can you blame him? It’s a fantastic image, Freud, abject, rejected, isolated on an old bed covered in the kind of quilt that makes you think of home. He holds his head in his hands. Is he crying? Frustrated? Desperate?

One word rises to the top: Regret.

And yet – even this term is tongue in cheek because as John’s recreates this image over and over and over again, he rubber stamps it with “Regrets, Jasper Johns” – a stamp used by the artist many times to decline a myriad of invitations and obligations.

Johns is playful here:

But it’s here, where the image of Freud is completely brushed back that things start to get interesting.

Funeral? Skulls?

How is it that the negative space of this image speaks of Regret even more than the actual image of Freud himself? He’s reduced to nothing but a blur and from that we see even more than before.

Blackness. Oblivion. What is that they say about staring into the void? Here it is, staring back.

It’s a layering. Freud to Bacon to Johns. Artist to artist to artist.

A peeling back of the skin, an unraveling.  A delicate spool of thread tossed off the cliff.

In what I can only describe as a “dissection” of an image, pulled through time, rescued from the rubbish, Johns shows us both its, and in a way, our very core. 


Aleathia says:

Years ago when I published a print zine I would put on documentaries and fold paper for hours.  I never did get to watch too many of them, but listening was enough.  I remember listening, eventually sucked in enough to watch, to a film about Agnes Martin called "Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World".

"Close" by Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin was born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912, but grew up in Vancouver.  She later moved to the United States and went to college at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.  She had studied art education and received her bachelor's degree from Columbia University.  While going to school there she heard a lecture by D. T. Suzuki and became deeply interested in Asian thought as a code of ethics.

She later matriculated at the University of New Mexico and taught art courses before receiving her master's degree at Columbia University.  She left New York City in 1967 and moved to New Mexico.  She built an adobe home and lived there the rest of her years, alone.

Agnes Martin is most known for her biomorphic paintings in subdued colors.  She was considered by most to be a minimalist, but she considered herself an abstract expressionist.

"The Sea" by Agnes Martin

She has been quoted praising Rothko for having "reached zero so that nothing could stand in the way of truth."

"The Wedding" by Agnes Martin

I have been a big fan of minimalism since an art class I took in Seattle where the teacher really ingrained in us that less can sometimes be more.  In my Buddhist studies I spend a lot of time trying to make life more quiet and simple.  I can also see where Agnes Martin would consider herself and abstract expressionist.  I feel like she is a holy marriage of both.  Up until 2011, I had never seen one of her paintings in person.  I had the privilege of going the Chicago Museum of Art and finding one of her glorious paintings tucked in the corner by a window.  It brought me to tears.....silent, heart felt tears at the stillness of her hand and her resolve to paint with such subtlety and grace.

Foodies - 5/29/2014

Aleathia says:

On my weekly adventure to the library I have found another cookbook that sparked my interest.  It is Alana Chernila's "The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making".

I love the idea of having less packaging and less chemical filled food.  Homemade is always better.  Having said this, it is also very time consuming and in some ways can be more costly.  If you have an expendable budget then there are many things you can afford to do at home.  I for one will continue to buy ketchup instead of mixing together 20 ingredients I may or may not have lying around the house.  Ketchup is 3 bucks and its taste is homey and smells of childhood, both mine and my child's, so why mess with that?

There are some great ideas for making your own pancake mixes, spice mixes, and homemade macaroni and cheese.  If you have the time and space for canning then this book is helpful as well.  I suppose it really matters how much time you have in your day.  There are so many things I would love to do in a day and I can't get them done now.  If I spent my time making these 101 foods.....I would get to sleep...maybe.

I am not knocking the validity of this book in anyway, but for me it was a bit of a strike out with having to split my time between a fiance, a child, a dog, a full time job, and being a home owner.  If I want to do anything for myself time has to get sliced off one of those things. I think the best thing to be aware of is that you CAN eliminate a lot of packaged foods if you want to.  I try my hardest as it is.  I'm just not at this place yet.

Go to your local library and check this book out.  There are some great recipes in there like homemade chai. I remember making this in Seattle when  I worked at a tea house.  This isn't the exact same recipe, but it is very similar.  Homemade chai is loads better than store bought.

Chai
Makes 6 cups

Storage:
Fridge in a covered container with milk, 5 days, without milk, 2 weeks
Freezer in freezer safe container, without milk, 6 months. (thaw in fridge and reheat with milk on stove)

5 cups water
1/4 cup roughly chopped unpeeled fresh ginger
Three 4 inch cinnamon sticks
3 whole cloves
4 cardamom pods
3 black peppercorns
One 1 inch circular slice unpeeled orange
4 black tea bags
1/4 to 1/2 cup honey, to taste
1 1/2 to 2 cups milk, to taste

Combine water, ginger cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, peppercorns, and orange slice in a medium pot. Partially cover the pot, bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer 15 minutes.

Take the pot off the heat, add the tea bags, cover and steep 5 minutes.  Put a strainer over a bowl and strain the liquid.  Add the honey to taste.  To store the chai in the fridge or freezer without milk, do so now. Otherwise return the tea to the pot, add milk and reheat.

Lit Bits - 5/28/2014 Marilynne Robinson

Aleathia says:

In my adventures to read all the Pulitzer Prize novels for Fiction, I came across Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" after seeing her novel "Gilead" on the list.  I had never read her work before and at the time I did not have access to her winning book, so I read "Housekeeping" instead.

The cover of this book haunted me and drew me in.  The idea that the end of the story might be masked in fog and an uneasy ride intrigued me.  It is a story of two young girls who live in Fingerbone, Idaho who are taken care of several family members after their mother drives the family car into the lake and kills herself. There is history in this lake as it is the same one their grandfather died in years before.  It is a story about surviving a barren emotional landscape that has its moments of joy and wonder.

“There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.” -Marilynne Robinson

This book has stayed with me over the years.  It touched me.  I wrote a poem about it and it pushed me to read more of her books.  I think you won't be sorry if you give this book a try.

Let's Go Somewhere! - 5/27/2014 Florence, Cleveland

Ally says:

Florence in June is hot. I mean really hot. It’s the kind of hot where the sun laser beams its heat through the top of your head allowing your skull to cook your brain like a macabre crockpot.

That sort of hot.

And yet, in the beginning we try to go out. We walk. We force smiles as sweat pours down our faces. I suggest stopping for a drink but the idea of wine in this heat turns my stomach. We’ve already been to the museums…all of them and there’s still another three days (three days with 90 plus temps) for us to kill before we return to Rome and then back home.

We cross the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. It is a wide open space – a massive yawning maw just cooking with heat. There is no shade, anywhere. I imagine this is what the Sahara is like – only with less screaming Italian children playing football. No one else seems to mind and I’m convinced these people aren’t human.

My husband spots it first.

The Fiddler’s Elbow.

An Irish pub - here, in this hot hell that is Florence. An Irish pub that will be dark and cavernous and cool and full of beer, the exact opposite of the Italian cafés that requite outdoor seating with no shade, too sweet wine and a glaring lack of air conditioning.

He crosses the piazza, desperate for the solace that the Fiddler’s Elbow could provide. Nay, must provide. When we walk through the front door, I nearly cry. The air conditioner is on high, blasting the sweat that has been pooling across my lower back into a fine ice. I exhale as we saddle up to the bar. My husband attempts to order in Italian – the few words we have managed to learn for this trip – but the Irish bartender waves it away with a laugh. She pours two thick frosty mugs for us.

“Settle in,” my husband tells me as the door swings open again, allowing a radiating blast of heat and light to penetrate this dark haven. “We’re gonna be a while.”

When we do leave, the sun has set and yet the pavement still crackles. A hazy fog has enveloped the city trapping the heat. When we get back to the hotel, which is called La Gioconda but we have renamed Hotel Hot Hell, we have to get our key from the desk. Each time we leave or come back we give it to the man at the desk and he hangs it up on the back wall. There are three of different men. Each has a varying look of disgust upon seeing us. This evening it’s the one who cares the least. He barely lifts his eyes from an afternoon spent people-watching to hand us our key. We take it and climb the M.C. Escher-esque staircases, march up and down long hallways, until we get back to our room.

            Inside, the air conditioning unit on the floor is turned off. The room is an inferno. I lean down to turn it on but nothing happens. Tried, a wee bit drunk, and frustrated I sit down on the floor. My husband strips down to his underwear and lays on the bed. He laments ever coming to this wretched city. I take all my working knowledge of small appliance repair – (exactly 0%) – and go to work fixing this thing. I touch a hose and it comes out in my hand. Water pools all over the floor.

“Uh oh.”

“What oh?”

“No, uh oh.”

“Your uh oh’s are never good.”

“I was just trying to fix it.”

“Why do you always have to touch everything?”

That is a valid statement. I do always have to touch everything, I think as the water continues to pool across the floor, soaking through the thread-bare carpet. I pick up the phone, call the front desk and attempt to explain what happened. With no working knowledge of Italian and an appalling lack of visible hand signs this proves difficult. I keep repeating “It is wet.”

After about 20 minute there is a knock on the door. It is the third man from downstairs – the one who seems the least interested in the affairs of this hotel. I imagine they are all brothers. If this were a Wes Anderson film he would be played by Adrian Brody. He seems put out. Exhausted.

He looks around the room, as if there were some other issue, before finally settling on the air conditioner unit. Brody zeroes in on the wet carpet. He taps it with this nice Italian shoes and water sloshes up the soul of his shoe. He sighs.

“It is wet,” Brody says.

“Yes. That’s what I said when I called you.” I mimic talking on the phone.

“I have another,” he turns toward the door.

Joy rises in my chest like a once trapped bird. “You have another air conditioning unit?” Oh sweet joy. I realize that this unit was probably broken all alone. I have a fantasy about a night’s sleep so deadly cold that I will need a blanket. A blanket! I shiver at the prospect of being wrapped up all snuggly.

He looks back at me. “No.”

“No?”

“No.”

My bird is brutally shot down. He opens the door and leaves. My husband, still on the bed, sighs. Brody returns with a handful of towels which he shoves under the air conditioning unit. He re-inserts the tube and clicks the machine on. It groans but then produces a thin stream of cool air.

“It’s okay?” I ask.

Brody shrugs. “I don’t know. Is fine. More towels.” He hands me a stack and with that he leaves.

I crawl into bed. My husband flips through the channels. There’s no BBC here so we settle on music videos. I watch Michael Kiwanuka sing and wander down a dusty road somewhere in the middle of America. It looks decidedly less hot there.

Tomorrow we will go to Sienna. It will also be unbearably hot in Sienna where everything will be the cover of my least favorite crayon in the box. I will get crapped on by a bird, which based on the size of its defecation, must be some sort of griffin/hippogriff mix. Its crap will cover my entire arm from my elbow to my wrist. So much that it will drip.

Two years later we’ll talk about going back. We’ll moon all wide-eyed over the beauty of Florence, the food, the wine, the art, the view from Piazzale Michelangelo (and conveniently forget the mountain we climbed in the heat to get there – every few steps my husband announcing that I should go on. That he is having a heart attack and prefers to die alone) We’ll laugh about Brody and I’ll wonder if he’s still sitting there…watching the tourists go by. A closet nearby stocked full of towels, just in case.

The author, inside the Fiddler's Elbow, demanding no more photos

Aleathia says:

Cleveland Rocks! Cleveland Rocks!  Ok, so I never really liked the Drew Carey show at all, but Cleveland really does rock.  

I have made many treks to Cleveland over the years for poetry readings and events.  This city loves poets and artists and they provide so many opportunities for them to flourish.  When I go to Cleveland I often stay with my friend Sue who is the ultimate hostess.  She loves showing off her city and all the wonderful things in it to do.

In 2011, Cleveland was part of my summer tour of poetry readings and art museums.  Sue had tons of plans for me and it was an eventful trip.  Our first stop when I arrived into town was to a quaint placed called the Treehouse Gallery and Tea Room in neighboring Avon, OH.

The Treehouse Gallery is filled with antique furniture, folk art, jewelry, and other finery you can purchase. They also have a tea room/restaurant.  This is the view from their forest lined deck where you can sit out and enjoy nature while you dine.

The food is heavy on the vegetables but very tasty.  They also have great iced teas.

When you walk around the complex you will find nice gardens, sculptures, and random folk art sprinkled on the grounds.

                         

After a little needed rest from traveling in the brutal June heat through the midwest, we went our for a night on the town to the Tremont Art Walk.  The is a great little neighborhood that envelopes their artists.  It was my first time going to this particular event which is held often in the summer and I'd go back again.

Tucked away in this little part of town is THE most amazing chocolate shop called Lilly Handmade Chocolates.  Not only are these melt in your mouth divine tasting, but the flavor combinations are endlessly interesting.  They are art you can eat!

The owners even have a wine and beer pairing with their chocolates!

The rest of the night included dinner at a cafeteria style service restaurant called Sokolowski's University Inn.  

This is a Polish establishment that makes hearty Polish style food and even sells Polish beers to go with your meal.  They were established 87 years ago to deliver food to the working man.  It is the oldest family owned and operated establishment in Cleveland.

It is right on the water so after dinner you can look out onto the city and its industry.

Lastly, we stopped off at a bar called Night Town.  It is a double sided bar split with walls of booze and a cubby door that the bartender slides through to serve people.  It has a nice old 50's feel to it.  Low light and quiet if that is what you are into if you go late, but they do have jazz music and were voted in the top 100 jazz bars in the country.  This bar was named after a Red Light District in a James Joyce novel.  

This concludes volume 1 of my Cleveland trip.  Keep a look out for more fun adventures in Cleveland!

Music Monday - 5/26/2014 Jason Derulo, Elvis Costello

Joe says:

Today we're getting silly, I guess.

Silly, right? I don't really think so. It was funny the first few times I heard it, but the more I watch this video (and damn do I keep watching it), the more I'm drawn into it for its own merits. This gentleman, clearly very talented, has taken a cheap* pop tune and transformed it. It's not so much a dissection, which implies it'd be broken down to smaller pieces; it's more of a constantly shifting set of filters applied to the song, an artist viewed (heard?) as a means through other artists.

It transcends itself, really. I won't throw more jargon around like I actually know what I'm talking about, but the result is an interesting aspect of the conversation that is art: what is it? How does one define it? Is it good? How does one define good?

The original song by Katy Perry can be argued as being good. Does it become less good when heard in the style of Slipknot? Or The Doors? The answers become less concrete when spun a bit differently: is there anything inherently wrong with a classical piece performed in a non-traditional way?

Genre naysayers will naysay as they please, but this writer loves the evolution of music and the myriad forms audio art can take. So dubstep classical might not be everyone's forte, but the fact it exists is beautiful to me. And that Ten Second Songs guy up top? His exploration of musical twists and turns should be just as commended.

Oh, and he also did Jason Derulo:

Okay, that one is pretty silly.

*in this humble writer's opinion.


Aleathia says:

It was damn busy in the ER last night.  I'm tired.  Double shot of Elvis Costello, bitches.

"Let Him Dangle"

"Deep Dark Truthful Mirror"

OM-5/25/2014 Buddism, Change

Aleathia says:

My dog irritates me on the early morning walk so generally I choose to fill this time with words of peace and wisdom.  I listen to videos of Buddhist teachers.  Most of the time I can relate with what they are saying and the information is a good reminder of my already solid understanding of certain basic concepts.  Sometimes I listen to them and get a proverbial punch in the face.

Earlier in the week I listened to a talk by Pema Chodron called "Fearless Non-theism".  It crushed me in so many ways.  For 3-4 straight days, I listened to this talk and continued to be floored by it and reminded of how weak I am when we get down to brass tacks.

"Fearless Non-theism" by Pema Chodron

The great thing about this talk and most of Pema's talks is that you don't really need to be a Buddhist to get them.  This talk in particular expands across any gender, race, religion, political, and emotional barrier.  It is truth, raw stinky truth.

Here is the text if you want to get down to the nitty gritty:

The difference between theism and non-theism is not whether one does or does not believe in

God. It is an issue that applies to everyone, including both Buddhists and non-Buddhists. Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there is some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. It means thinking there is always going to be a babysitter available when we need one. We all are inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves. Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves. We sometimes think that dharma is something outside of ourselves, something to believe in, something to measure up to. However, dharma isn't a belief; it isn't a dogma. It is total appreciation of impermanence and change. The teachings disintegrate when we try to grasp them. We have to experience them without hope. Many brave and compassionate people have experience them and taught them. The message is fearless; dharma was never meant to be a belief that we blindly follow. Dharma gives us nothing to hold on to at all.

Non-theism is finally realizing that there is no baby sitter that you can count on. You just get a good one and then he or she is gone. Non-theism is realizing that it's not just babysitters that come and go. The whole of life is like that. This is the truth, and the truth is inconvenient.

For those who want something to hold on to, life is even more inconvenient. From this point of view, theism is an addiction. We're all addicted to hope, hope that the doubt and mystery will go away. This addiction has a painful effect on society: a society based on lots of people addicted to getting ground under their feet is not a very compassionate place.

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don't have to feel it's happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long as we're addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot.

Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can't simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what is going on, but that there is something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.

This is where renunciation enters the picture, renunciation of the hope that we could be better. The Buddhist monastic rules that advise renouncing liquor, renouncing sex, and so on are not pointing out that those things are inherently bad or immoral, but that we use them as babysitters. We use them as a way to escape; we use them to try to get comfort and to distract ourselves. The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are. Renunciation is teaching to inspire us to investigate what's happening every time we grab something because we can't stand to face what's coming.

If hope and fear are two sides on one coin, so are hopelessness and confidence. If we're willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path. If there is no interest in stepping beyond hope and fear, then there's no meaning in taking refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Taking refuge in Buddha, dharma, and sangha is about giving up hope of getting ground under our feet. We are ready to take refuge when this style of teaching, whether we feel completely up to it or not, is like hearing something hauntingly familiar, like the experience of a child meeting its mother after a long separation.

Hopelessness is the basic ground. Otherwise, we're going to make the journey with the hope of getting security. If we make the journey to get security, we're completely missing the point. We can do our meditation practice with the hope of getting security; we can study the teachings with the hope of getting security; we can follow all the guidelines and instructions with the hope of getting security; but it will only lead to disappointment and pain. We could save ourselves a lot of time by taking this message very seriously right now. Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet. Begin with hopelessness.

All anxiety, all dissatisfaction, all the reasons for hoping that our experience could be different are rooted in our fear of death. Fear of death is always in the background. As the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, life is like getting into a boat that's just about to sail out to sea and sink. But it's very hard, no matter how much we hear about it, to believe in our own death. Many spiritual practices try to encourage us to take our own death seriously, but it's amazing how difficult it is to allow it to hit home. That one thing in life that we can really count on is incredibly remote for all of us. We don't go so far as to say, "No way, I'm not going to die," because of course we know that we are. But it definitely will be later. That's the biggest hope.

Trungpa Rinpoche once gave a public lecture titled "Death in Everyday Life." We are raised in a culture that fears death and hides it from us. Nevertheless, we experience it all the time. We experience it in the form of disappointment, in the form of things not working out. We experience it in the form of things always being in a process of change. When the day ends, when the second ends, when we breathe out, that's death in everyday life.

Death in everyday life could also be defined as experiencing all the things that we don't want. Our marriage isn't working; our job isn't coming together. Having a relationship with death in everyday life means that we begin to be able to wait, to relax with insecurity, with panic, with embarrassment, with things not working out. As the years go on, we don't call the babysitter quite so fast.

Death and hopelessness provide proper motivation, proper motivation for living an insightful, compassionate life. But most of the time, warding off death is our biggest motivation. We habitually ward off any sense of problem. We're always trying to deny that it's a natural occurrence that things change, that the sand is slipping through our fingers. Time is passing. It's as natural as the seasons changing and day turning into night. But getting old, getting sick, losing what we love, we don't see those events as natural occurrences. We want to ward off that sense of death, no matter what.

Excerpted from When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice for Difficult Times,

by Pema Chodron, Shambhala Publications, 1997, pp. 38-45.

Quills and Frills-5/24/2014 Writing Prompt

Savory
by Ally Malinenko

Wet cardboard. Warm wet cardboard.

Think of wet cardboard – where it’s pulpy on top, a mushy consistency but the bottom is still firm and then leave the whole thing in the sun so that it’s baked warm to the touch.

That will give you some idea of what this is like when I actually put a slice of pizza in my mouth. The bigger problem is that it still smells just like pizza. Mouth-watering cheesy delicious pizza.

This is life without the sense of taste – the life I now live.

In the beginning I thought it was a just a cold.

I woke one day and the pancakes on my plate at the diner tasted – well... puffy. Only puffy. Like biting into a mouse-sized mattress. It was spongy and soft. Springy even. But there was no taste.

I put the fork down.

“What?” my girlfriend asked. She sat across from me both eating and thumbing through her phone.

“These don’t taste like anything.”

She rolled her eyes, speared a piece of pancake from my plate with her fork and popped it into her mouth. I watched the muscles of her jaw work.

“They taste like pancakes,” she said swallowing. “You’re probably getting a cold. Don’t be sick for Sunday’s thing. I know you don’t want to go but I promised Denise.”

I nodded, dipping a finger into the pool of syrup on the plate. I licked only cold mucus. Slime trailed down my throat.

Next was pasta. Noodles were worms. Spaghetti sauce has the same consistency as Elmer’s glue. Onion were slugs – hard on the outside and then a pop of warm mush inside. I gagged on those.

She ordered Chinese food. I got nothing from it but the slick acrid oil from the fry cooker. Vegetables gave me only something elemental – dirt and root, the birthing bed of life.

Every beverage was water. Coffee was hot water. Wine was cursed by some hypocritical bastard deity. Scotch on rocks was the first thing that gave me something – but that something was only the bitter tart left over of rubbing alcohol.

At first I panicked. I took swigs of hot sauce. My throat raged in fire but otherwise nothing. My tongue lay inside my mouth – a dead useless thing.

For the first few months I took over cooking. I over-salted, over-spiced everything. My girlfriend burst into tears at the dinner table while I raged in the kitchen.

When we made love, the sweet tang of her skin – the taste of her - was lost to me. I mourned that one most of all.

Eventually I stopped eating. Food had no meaning without taste. My weight dropped severely. My once toned body withered.

The doctor told me not to worry. He gave me brochures that told me taste usually returns. It would all be over in a year or two at the latest. A year or two? My stomach roiled. Was I supposed to live two years like this?
"Is it ever permanent?" I asked.
In answer, he pressed his pillowy lips together until they were nothing more than a white line.

Time passed. In small doses I sometimes found something. One time ginger popped in my mouth, barking attention from listless taste buds. I nearly died that day. It wasn’t much but it was something. Every forkful was another shot fired in this war. When I got something from food, it was a gift. I cursed myself for not appreciating it before.

“I think I got this,” my girlfriend said when I opened the door to our apartment. She stood over the range, enveloped in the aromatic wafting scent of something Indian. She looked stunning, her dark hair, her large eyes. I dropped my bag to the floor and wrapped my arms around her, nuzzling the nape of her neck. I pressed my lips to her skin and inhaled the scent of her. I wanted to tell her I loved her. To thank her for trying. To apologize for what our life had become but she’s too busy detailing the ingredients in the pan before her. I let my tongue just graze her skin. Give me something, please. Just the salt of her, I’ll take that even.  I close my eyes.

“I checked with the Doctor. He agreed that it was worth a shot. We’re going to wake that tongue of yours up, baby,” she said, adding another large dollop of yogurt sauce and curry to the mixture. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

Nothing. Not even the salty flavor of her sweat. Her flesh was no different than the chicken she pushed around that pan. I tell her I won’t worry. I turn towards the spice rack and open the hot sauce. I shake some onto my tongue. I let it sit there like a pill I can’t swallow. And I pray to a god I’m starting to hate.


Untitled
by Joseph Bouthiette Jr.

This is how I learned to fall.

Maybe I’m losing weight, maybe I’m stumbling in a loss of my sense of weight. Or maybe I’m losing my sense of the ground. The ground, our perpendicular lover, but I’m growing more acquainted with her with every fall. Through her, the continents rumble and through me, the outpour of freshly opened scrapes. With each step I risk embracing her once more, my inner ears spinning like clouds in the wind. I close my eyes in that moment of uncertainty.

Shall I remain firmly rooted in place? Or shall I fall, a sheep to my gravity’s shepherd? Then I open my eyes, spine clattering against hard earth and eyes full of clouds. Through her, the dirt, I now embrace my true love, her, the sky.

This is how I learned to fly.

[Author's note: this is a remix of sorts of my prose poem "How I Learned to Fly" which can be read in its original form here. Stole a lot of lines from it that I liked for this piece on the loss of the sense of balance. Both are needlessly abstract and silly, but enjoy!]

Trampoline
By Aleathia Drehmer

Bonita was exceptionally clumsy.  Her mother had reminded her of this fact whenever she could and the opportunity arose often.  She used to tell Bonita that grace stopped by while she was sleeping and never bothered coming back.  It was not very surprising when Bonita awoke on the stretcher in the Emergency Room with her face bandaged.

The last thing she remembered was jumping on the trampoline with her friends.  She daringly did a back flip, feeling invincible as she bounced so high, and now she was here.  The ER was noisy—so many bells and whistles, so much chatter between patients and families, and medical banter of doctors.  Bonita looked around the room.  She could barely see over the bulky dressing across her nose.  There was a pain there like insipid fire, yet, she wasn’t really in pain.

Her mother sat there beside the bed with a look on her face that was equal parts irritation, “I hope you’re ok” and “I told you so”.  She said nothing to Bonita, so she said nothing back to her mother.  In their shared silence Bonita noticed she couldn’t smell anything.

It’s just the bandage, she told herself.

Well if it is just the bandage smarty then how come you can’t smell the gauze or the blood? She questioned.

She was very puzzled, but at 14 years old what did she know about noses and a person’s sense of smell?  All she knew was that her nose hurt and her face wasn’t too far behind it the longer she lay there in wonder.    Bonita counted the dots in the ceiling tiles while she waited in the swirl of noise around her. The doctor came into the room and told Bonita’s mother, not Bonita, that her nose was broken and there was nothing they could do about it.  She would have to see the specialist in a week.

Bonita cringed.  Specialist.  That meant a lot of money and she knew that her mother didn’t have the cash to pay for any of this.  She suddenly felt tiny inside as if she were a painfully heavy burden on her mother.  The doctor suddenly looked her in the eyes, standing over her smiling and chuckled.  “And you young lady are going to have a pair of black eyes.  Don’t blow your nose or there will be bleeding.”  Bonita nodded at the doctor and thought it was strange he thought this was all funny.  She did not mention her loss of smell.  She didn’t think it was permanent anyway.

The week passed and Bonita wore the purple badge across her face awkwardly.  Her friends made jokes and Bonita laughed as she always did when she hurt herself being clumsy, but inside she felt a darkness brewing.  Her food was tasteless and bland no matter how much salt or spice she used.  She could not smell the lilacs blooming beneath her bedroom window, or smell the early summer air with its sticky heaviness.  Bonita couldn’t even smell her brother’s horrid gym sneakers that he left closed up in the bathroom.  She was sort of glad of it, but at the same time it was a scent that told the story of her life.

The specialist told her she was fine when she mentioned she couldn’t smell properly.  He told her sometimes that happens with trauma, but he assured her it would come back.  Anosmia he said.  That was the real word for it.  He expected her to look impressed, but she struggled with the concept.  What will I do if I can’t ever smell again? She thought.

Many more weeks passed and Bonita became sullen.  She could smell nothing and the world slipped by her as if she were not even there.  She could not identify with the everyday workings of her own life.  It felt desolate and all her natural joy at being alive drained away into the grass she was standing on but could not smell.  Bonita thought of dying.  She dreamed of smelling the blood and the last threads of air in her lungs as they collapsed on themselves.  It would be so much better than this torture, she thought, seeing the world and not enjoying it.  She stood there in the yard a long time with this final ending.  Bonita smiled and put her arms out as if to be taken up into the heavens.

Bonita!!! God damn it, for the last time, dinner is ready!! Her mother shouted from the window.

Not this time, she thought, not this time.

( These stories were written from a single prompt.  What if you freakishly lost one of your senses, what would your life be like?)

Art Bomb-5/23/2014 Frank Stella, Theo Jansen

Aleathia says:

In 2011, I went on a summer tour of art museums along the Great Lakes and stopped to see friends as well. I went to the Toledo Museum of Art to see the Frank Stella exhibit.  I saw a great number of wonderful artists I had never been exposed to, but the Stella exhibit was simple and large and child-like.  It featured work from his Polygon series:

Frank Stella is known for his minimalism and his post-painterly abstractions.  He is still alive today and active in his work.

Through his lifetime he has explored many facets of minimalism.  In the 50's and 60's he did work from the Black Painting series:

In the late 60's and 70's he did work in the Protractor series:

In the 80's and afterward, Stella has been active in sculpture and architecture pieces:

In all that he has done it is apparent that he enjoys himself.  There is something wonderful about that childhood feeling of your first picture done inside the lines.  His precision and color choices never stop pleasing me.

Also, Instagram Project update....piece #2 is done!

Joe says:

As a biology major, and one who loves life sciences, art which explores these themes has always excited me. Combined with my love for the avant garde, the unique, the bizarrely beautiful, I occasionally come across some pretty neat works of art. Over the next few weeks, I hope to create a short series tentatively called The Art of Life, an exploration of where these two fantastical fields meet.

To start us off, we're looking at the kinetic sculpture work of Dutch artist Theo Jansen. Since 1991, Jansen has been working exclusively on a project to create strandbeests (roughly translated to "beach animals"), a series of moving "lifeforms" built from PVC piping. Before going any further, here's one in action, accompanied by Theo himself:

More videos of the artist and his creations exist, but this one is a personal favorite of mine since it has no narration, no extraneous noises. Just Theo and the strandbeest.

This particular sculpture manages to evoke numerous real-world organisms in my mind, simultaneously accomplishing insectile motion...

...while also resembling the float of a Portuguese man-o-war.

Like life itself, Jansen's strandbeests comes in a variety of flavors, such as this one that looks like a lobster built from windmills:

Then there's this sturdy-looking wall of a sculpture Jansen calls the "rhinoceros."

For me, there is no better example of the blurring between art and science than seeing these magnificent creatures pull away from their creator and take to the wind (literally; these things are wind-powered!).

And that's a wrap of our first installment of The Art of Life! Have suggestions for future installments? Leave a comment below! Anything that bends the barrier between art and biology, anatomy as sculpture or stranger things besides.

Foodies-5/22/2014 The Book Lover's Cook Book

Aleathia says:

Every week we go to the library to scavenge music to upload.  Michael looks for new videos and I browse the enormous cook book section.  I'm always looking for some way to spice up our gluten free lives. Sometimes I only find a handful of recipes in any given book that I can make for us with the combination of our allergies and personal tastes so it is never beneficial for me to own these cook books.  The library is a wonderful thing!

So this week I came across this book:

The Book Lover's Cookbook by Wenger and Jensen

What could be better?  Literature laced cook book?  Recipes inspired by the great writers of the world?  I love this idea because we all have read novels where food plays an important role in the main characters life as it does our own.  As humans we gather to eat in our homes, we gather in parks to eat, we go out to eat. Nurturing each other is essential to our happiness so why should it be any different for characters in novels?

I can't guarantee that I will be making the recipes I post from this book, but chances are I will give them a try in the long run.  I'm just saying I can't attest to how good or bad it turns out at this time.  Let's wing it together!

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

"They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty steps within the sombre depths of the forest, and then cooked some bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn "pone" stock they had brought.  It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would return to civilization.  The climbing fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared tree-trunks of their forest temple, and upon the varnished foliage and festooning vines.

When the last crisp slice of bacon was gone, and the last allowance of corn pone devoured, the boys stretched themselves out on the grass, filled with contentment.  They could have found a cooler place, but they would not deny themselves such a romantic feature as the roasting campfire."


Traditional Southern Crackling Corn Bread

1 lb country style bacon or pork rind, cut 1/3 inch thick
1.5 cups yellow cornmeal
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 T sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1.25 cps milk
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
4 T unsalted butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  In a 10 inch cast iron skillet, cook the bacon or port rind over moderate heat until crisp, about 7 minutes.  Drain on paper towels; chop when cool.  Reserve 2 T of drippings.

Wipe out the skillet and set it over low heat.  Add the drippings and swirl to coat the pan.  In a medium bowl, combine the cornmeal with the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.  In another bowl, combine the milk and eggs and add to the cornmeal mixture along with the butter; stir just until the cornmeal is moistened. Fold in the bacon and pour the batter into the warm skillet.  Bake for about 20 minutes or until golden brown and a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Serve warm

Lit Bits-5/21/2014 Wallace Stegner, Herman Koch, Matthew Revert

Aleathia says:

When I was living in Seattle, after getting comfortable in a new big city, I decided to embark on a journey of reading going against the old adage "Don't judge a book by its cover".  I was feeling a bit rebellious and decided that for an entire year I would only choose books based on the cover art.  I would not read anything about them so as to know what I was getting into.

I found that you could judge a book by its cover and that a nice looking one often tells you visually something about your own aesthetic in the world.  One of the books I chose was a book called "Crossing to Safety" by Wallace Stegner.

I had never read any of his work before and I fell in love with his writing style.  Over the years I sought out many of his other novels.  I will never forget the day I finished his book "Angle of Repose" which won him a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  It changed the way I looked at writing and about the human condition.  It solidified my love for pushing west, pioneer, down on your luck stories.  After reading that book I decided that I was then going to read all the winners of the Pulitzer for all time.  I have not completed that goal yet, but I have collected all but 25 of the novels and read about 30 of the 80.

Wallace Stegner shapes characters that you can't help but love.  You want them to succeed even when you know in your heart of hearts they are destined to fail.  You feel their pain as if it were your own.  I close the back cover of his books with a sense of satisfaction, that everything ended up where it was supposed to be.

He is one of my top five authors of all time.  You should check out his work if you haven't already.

Addendum by Joe:

If you want to judge books by their covers, pick up anything designed by Matthew Revert. He is a god of graphic designing and has been doing an amazing job of dressing the small press world in dapper outfits for publication.

Ally says:

I like unreliable narrators.

I like them because I feel like when they’re telling me a story it’s not all altruistic bull. You ever notice that about reliable narrators? They’re just dying to have someone fall in love with them – to have someone root for them. They’re like Tom Brady. Or any quarterback. Just a touchdown behind, seconds unraveling from the clock, desperate for that Hail Mary pass which they pray for and then we pray for and then it happens – sails through the almighty air like it’s guided by the hand of whatever god we’ve conjured up for the time being and lands right in the receiver’s hands who is guided over the line, dance and all. We stand, we cheer, we pump fists.

Everybody wins.

Right?

Sure. Except sometimes isn’t it nice to sit at the feet of someone deliciously deceptive and hear a tale that sounds a little bit more like the kind of thing that we would tell? Mostly truthful. A bit of a lie. We’ll pepper it with misconceptions - small things that bend the favor toward us. Altruism is a word we do not understand and therefore we do not obey.

Is it an American thing? Our constant need for happy endings even when life itself dishes up nothing but?

Herman Koch wrote a book called The Dinner. Here’s what it’s about:

A summer's evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of politeness - the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened... Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera, and their grainy images have been beamed into living rooms across the nation; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified - by everyone except their parents. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children and, as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

Except it's also about so much more. Cue vicious curdled laugh. Mwha-ha-ha!

Besides chances are good some of your favorite narrators are already unreliable. Hello? Holden? Huck Finn?

It’s easy to love the good guy. Let’s all fall in love with the decidedly complicated human guy for a change. Come on, he's just like you and me.