ROSEANNE'S BLOG
Don't Forget
Sign Up....
for my EMAIL LIST... I'll be starting newsletters daily
July 3, 2008
Johnny on The Fourth
Johnny's Birthday Reflection "Independence Day?"
Friday, The Fourth of July is my birthday and that seems to have more weight than it has for a long time. I'm going to be fifty-nine. That's right, it's my last year to say I'm Fifty-anything. I try to have a good attitude about getting older but now we live in the world of the terminally young and I'm affected by that like almost everybody else. This isn't going to be a whiney, self-indulgent complaint about getting old; I already have one of those ready and I'll be dragging it out next year when I hit Sixty {if I 'hit" it).
Anyway, the meaning behind the day off and all the fireworks and all that is: Independence Day. The Founding Fathers declared that the 13 colonies weren't possessions of England anymore, or The Mother country, as it was called. It makes me think of the idea of independence, generally. Are any of us really independent? I say, Hell No - we're at the mercy of Everything, from the ticking heart in our chests to some A-hole who has one too many and can slam into us on the freeway or whatever. Between Mother Nature, the Biological Imperative, The Human Dilemma, Entropy, The IRS, Global Warming and the jackasses who run things - I don't feel the least bit independent. Do you guys, really? But, in keeping with the paradoxical nature of reality: this awareness of being vulnerable and having Mother Nature and everything else up my ass like a hand in a sock puppet is the same thing that helps me actually feel a kind of independence! Screw it! I ain't in charge. Anything can happen and will some day, so I'm going to let go of a whole bunch of willful worrying and not even sweat it! I'm not the umpire; I'm just another dumbass ballplayer. I'll try to control what I think I can control but I'm not kidding myself. One day, this'll all be over and what I've always thought of as "me" will eventually be like one more drop of water over Niagra Falls and I won't even be forgotten. It's a little sad but strangely exhilarating at the same time.
Funny, isn't it? Realizing my utter dependence on Everything and the way I'm so embedded actually provides a sense of something like Independence. Make any sense? If not...so what? Making "sense" is overrated. It doesn't really go all that far. But...please remember to drive carefully - don't be a designated drunk driver! If you drink a fifth on The Fourth you might not come forth on the fifth. Happy Independence Day, everybody!
Posted at 5:24 PM - Permalink
sepia
Posted at 12:03 PM - Permalink
war for oil defeats war against terror:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/opinion/01herbert.html
Posted at 11:36 AM - Permalink
the future
women breeding soldiers and workers and more breeders.
Posted at 11:24 AM - Permalink
both obama and mccain
are having trouble reaching the middle americans.
Posted at 11:11 AM - Permalink
Margaret Cho Interview
Take a look at an excerpt from my exclusive interview with comedian Margaret Cho for her cover feature for Interlude Magazine - on stands 8/8/08.
You can subscribe to the magazine right now at YourDailyLesbianMoment.blogspot.com.
They're giving away free poster replicas of Margaret's cover when you subscribe.
Posted at 8:40 AM - Permalink
fave room
Posted at 12:19 AM - Permalink
July 2, 2008
colossus goddess
Posted at 8:22 PM - Permalink
June 28, 2008
forum is back up
try to stick to issues rather than personal politics.
Posted at 11:22 PM - Permalink
June 27, 2008
freetheslaves.net
http://www.freetheslaves.net/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=381&srcid=308
the children of israel are gathering. (how long shall they kill our prophets while we stand around and look, some say its just a part of it, we've got to fulfill the book. redemption songs).
Posted at 11:38 AM - Permalink
what is really happening to the 12 tribes:
Rare Iraqi Jewish books 'surface in Israel'
Some 300 rare and valuable books confiscated from Iraq's Jewish community by Saddam Hussein's regime have been secretly spirited into Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday.
The books include a 1487 commentary on the biblical Book of Job and another volume of biblical prophets printed in Venice in 1617, the Haaretz daily said.
The volumes are part of a massive collection of books confiscated by the secret police of the executed Iraqi dictator and stored in security installations in the Iraqi capital until the US-led invasion of 2003.
Many volumes were damaged during the bombing of government buildings in the opening weeks of the war, and after the fall of Baghdad most of the books were sent off to be temporarily stored at the Library of Congress in Washington.
Others however ended up in the hands of private dealers.
"We bought them from thieves," Mordechai Ben-Porat, an Iraqi-born Jew and the founder of Jerusalem's Babylonian Jewry Heritage centre told the newspaper, adding that the foundation paid some 25,000 dollars (16,000 euros).
In the beginning, Ben-Porat sent an emissary to Baghdad who shipped the books directly to Israel, but once the Americans caught wind of his activities they forbade further shipments, forcing him to smuggle the rest, he said.
Iraq once hosted a thriving 2,600 year-old Jewish community that numbered some 130,000 people at the time Israel was created in 1948.
But after Israel came into being and into conflict with its Arab neighbours, Iraqi Jews began to suffer discrimination and were often accused of being agents of the new Jewish state.
By 1952 more than 123,000 had left the country, and 20 years later there were no more than 500 left.
Many more left the country following the 1991 Gulf War and today, after the chaos unleashed by the US-led invasion and the overthrow of Saddam, only some two dozen are believed to remain.
Posted at 11:30 AM - Permalink
June 25, 2008
paul and i in london before cameron and aniston
Posted at 2:36 PM - Permalink
June 24, 2008
my rose photo
Posted at 1:06 PM - Permalink
June 23, 2008
George Carlin
Posted at 8:20 PM - Permalink
george carlin rip
george carlin was a shamer of god, and that is not an easy thing to do, but it is commanded of those who live the calling. You must be able to dig down underneath myth and taboo, and find the intelligence that is hidden there, and then by removing the ten husks of negativity (klipa)that surround it, polish the gem and present it to heaven. When god sees the truth she laughs and is much pleased!!!
Posted at 12:23 PM - Permalink
bob barr
i am sending him money...i hope he helps defeat mccain!
Posted at 11:19 AM - Permalink
george carlin ascends
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTyzTJTNhNk
masterful comic, deep philosophical thinker, weaver of words, slayer of dragons, enemy of heartless capitalism and middle class bigotry. Hero to generations of writers. peace forever. My sympathy to his family.
Posted at 11:01 AM - Permalink
christopher makos
Art Feature: I Shot Andy Warhol
"that's Beijing" magazine talks to Warhol's personal photographer Christopher Makos
by Venus Lau
The year was 1982 and China was still untouched by "postmodernism"- that smearing of the line between "lowbrow" and "highbrow" art. It was also the year that Andy Warhol, the pop-art legend who paid homage to consumerism through iconophilia such as the Gold Marilyn Monroe and the Campbell's soup cans, visited China.
Warhol was not alone on his journey. With him came his collaborator and personal photographer Christopher Makos, who returns to Beijing this May to exhibit the photos he took during this famous visit.
We spoke to Makos about the trip he made 26 years ago to a city almost unrecognizable compared to what it is today. Recollecting his memories of a China where Hongqi (Red Flag) cars rolled up dusty streets and students' feet strolled in white canvas sneakers rather than in Nike Airs, Makos described driving in from the airport in terms of "seeing all the bicycles"- a far cry from the congested traffic we're used to on the Airport Expressway.
And if Warhol were still alive today, where would they visit? Makos's reply was simple enough: "[Go back to] all the places that we visited together, then see all the new architecture and visit with all the new cool Chinese artists."
By "cool Chinese artists," Makos is referring to luminaries such as "Ai Weiwei, Feng Zhengjie, the artist that does the photos of himself with all the flies on his face [Zhang Huan]."
But if Warhol were alive today, he'd doubtless be intrigued by the consumerism and materialism which have crept into the pantheon of Chinese contemporary art: the shocking prices, the Shenzhen Dafen painting village that exports more than a million replicas worldwide, the repetition in producing visual icons on canvas (for instance, Yue Minjun's laughing men). All these phenomena are on track with Warhol's apothegm on commercial art: "Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."
All this is intensified by employing mass production methods, including silkscreen prints - not only does the duplication of the same image not eradicate the aura of art, but it brought Warhol to the altar of contemporary art. Whether people love him or hate him, they simply can't avoid him.
As a close collaborator with the silver-maned artist, Makos points out the linkage between the two different commercialisms behind China's contemporary art and Warhol's: "They are the same. The two have finally met face to face. Andy was mass market, just [as] the culture when he visited was mass market. But at that time, it was mass in a political sense; now it is mass in a consumer sense."
Makos' mentor was Man Ray, a photographer/painter who straddled Dadaism and surrealism. Yet Makos' work does not resemble Ray's experimentation with rayographs and fathoms of superimposition, nor is his photography influenced by Warhol's nearly impressionist snapshots. In fact, he is quite the opposite.
"I was the teacher, Andy was the student. Also, Andy always would appropriate photos from newspapers...magazines, and when we met he was much more interested in learning how to take pictures for himself."
Andy Warhol in China will be shown from May 24 to Sep 7 at Timezone 8. The book by Christopher Makos, with an introduction by Ai Weiwei, is available at Timezone 8.
Art Feature: I Shot Andy Warhol
Posted at 10:47 AM - Permalink
June 22, 2008
check this out: vote repub
http://www.imvotingrepublican.com/
Posted at 3:59 PM - Permalink
guest blogger: chef Linda:
I spent a lot of time in my garden this afternoon. Gardening in this altitude with topsoil about 1/16th of an inch deep, a growing season of ten-twleve weeks, and those surprize deep frosts in June is quite a challenge. I find the contact with the earth well worth the blisters, sore backs and tires knees. Nothing quite beats the joy of....
Gardening
The first tomato is a joy to behold. Some of my tomatoes are holdovers from last year. I have an enormous pale green spider taking care of the aphids for me on one vining cherry tomato plant. That's the only organic way I know to kill the nasty little creatures! Oh, I know someone is going to pipe up with "what about Dawn liquid and water?" Well that might kill your aphids but mine thought it was champagne and developed a taste for it while being the cleanest bugs on the block. If you can raise a tomato up here without the aphids, the slugs, the rodents or frostbite killing it, you can feel a bit of pride! I have four different kinds of tomatoes this year. I have a fantasy where I harvest enough of them to can salsa! In my efforts towards this end I have also planted Hot peppers of different types.
My garden is only four cinderblocks wide by five cinderblocks long. Each section of each cinderblock is filled with soil and has something planted in it. I have Dianthus, Sweet Basil, Curly Leafed Parsley, Primroses, Creeping Thyme, Poppies, Baby's Breath, Purple Pole Beans, Squash, Pumpkin and Dill planted in them.
Next year I may add another row of cinderblocks on top so I don't have to bend over so much and put another two hundred pounds of topsoil in. This winter I am laying some of my neighbors older manure on top of the soil and letting the winter snow leach it in for a great organic fertilizer. The weed block I put in the bottom of this garden when we built it two years ago seems to be working well still. The only weeds I get are the ones that blow in on the wind but there are plenty of those.
This tiny plot of ground adds so much more to my well being than a source of fresh vegetables. The savings everytime I use my fresh herbs instead of dried costly ones from the store is a thrill to me. It is almost as big a thrill to me as the incredible flavor of fresh as opposed to dried herbs.
I doubt my fence keeps anything out and I don't know if I will win the War of the Rodents this year but it's worth a try. Many of my bigger efforts are going into pots this year so I can salvage them if the weather turns cold early. Spring and fall are the times my house smells like the greenhouse it's being used for. I feel like I am being laved in oxygen and breath deeply in the soil-scented air.
I am using every square inch of the area available to me for something. I've pulled out the useless stuff over the years and almost everything growing here can be used for more than just something pretty to look at.
Tonight I'm taking some of my sister's chicken eggs and making an omelet with delicate young herbs. Two or three weeks from now I'll be having my first leaves of spinach. I've already harvested the tiny dandilion leaves when they were young enough to not be bitter, wilted them in bacon grease and had a tasty sallit (as it was often spelled in the diaries of mountain women in the 1800s.)
My everchanging delight of a hobby is not just the six months spend in sprouting, planting, caring, harvesting, storing and eating. The other six months are spent in planning and dreaming and fondly thinking of afternoons like this one spent pottering (what an odd word) in the garden.
Posted at 12:04 PM - Permalink
hillary reminds me of me
i am getting excited about her being the voice of women and children and the working folks in the senate of the united states...its most powerful feminist ever.
Posted at 11:50 AM - Permalink
June 21, 2008
granny a hit with lemon teeth last eve
Posted at 1:44 PM - Permalink
cindy mccain drug thief
Posted at 1:26 PM - Permalink
clinton!
get busy in the senate hillary...you can advise barack like no other human alive! i am so glad that the republican attack machine is the goliath that ba-rock is slaying! I hope this means that the dems can take some criticism now about their shitty party. I am hoping that i can vote green, and that the dems won't need my vote. If it gets close I will vote for obama, but if his margin is wide enough, I want to vote green.
Posted at 10:56 AM - Permalink
June 20, 2008
great photographer and friend christopher makos' shanghai
Posted at 11:10 AM - Permalink
SEARCH
CATEGORIES
LINKS
BLOG ARCHIVES
SUBSCRIBE
