Dance - Everyone's Watching

The introspection didn't start because of the numerous and plentiful articles and responses about "geek girls" and "girl gamers" and women in general. It started, like so many things start, with Madonna.

I have always admired Madonna, even when I wasn't fond of her music. I admired her ambition, sense of risk and willingness to go big or go home. I liked her tough girl art-chick persona in her early movies, Desperately Seeking Susan and Who's that Girl. I rooted for her even though I didn't buy her albums. They were occasionally fun to dance to, and since I was desperately trying to be an actor I knew all the words and could sing along because that's what you do. You learn ALL the things when you are an actor so that you can use them. Ironically, unironically, bitterly, joyously. You need to be able to feel all the things the way someone might feel them, even if you don't particularly. The first Madonna song I liked was "Like a Prayer" and I probably liked that song because it's true.

When the person I love calls my name it still feels a bit like a revelation - and like prayer sometimes it's intense, or sometimes it's a shock that you still notice or care, and sometimes its a reminder of transcendence. Sometimes it's home.

It's a funny thing about that lyric though. Like all callow youth and the default of all pop songs and everything Madonna it was interpreted by some of my peer group to be about sex, specifically about blowjobs, because of the chorus:


When you call my name it's like a little prayer 
I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there 
In the midnight hour I can feel your power 
Just like a prayer you know I'll take you there 
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/madonna/like+a+prayer_20086915.html ] 


But that interpretation was made by a bunch of oversexed hormonal theatrical twenty somethings who were busy either creating their own spirituality or vociferously rejecting oppressive theologies. I do not say that last bit with snark. It was the era of AIDS. We were surrounded by a group called the "me generation" in the press and the rising of the Moral Majority in our politics and school system. Everyone was either letting us wander along or preaching at/to us.  We were diesnfranchised in the most literal sense being taught that "you can't fight city hall". The biggest joke at my school ( once again most likely because it was true) was that we wrote a longform article on the apathy of our student body and no one read it because they didn't care. Literally, no one even picked up our school paper.

Here's the part of the song you have to ignore in order to concentrate on the sex as subtext in Like A Prayer


Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone 
I hear you call my name 
And it feels like home


To accept that this song is only about relationships to other humans an not about something more; life, meaning, place, is to ignore that there's no relationship given, that there's no vision or contact with the subject of the song. It ignores that there might be a voice as metaphor that calls her name and the feeling is actually based in a religious feeling.

She wrote a song about her name being called. She made a video explicitly showing the conflicts of being called out by a suffering god and and and angry population and it was looked at not as a song truly about her personal expression/experience of the merging of the conflict/joy of that feeling and interacting with a suffering god in a world ignoring the god and abusing the symbols it was looked at as a publicity stunt to piss off religious people and a song about blowjobs. But that bit:

When you call my name


He said to him "Abraham"

It's like a little prayer

and he answered "Here I am."

Hinneni 

If I had put this allusion through it's paces at the diner after rehearsal while everyone was making blowjob jokes,  I wouldn't have been mocked but I would have been kind of looked at as a killjoy. And honestly at that time the idea that Madonna was genuinely interested in religion or spiritual fulfillment would have been taken as a joke.  If I had brought it up in a group of pagan women I would have been taken to task for a number of things, but one of them would have been why I thought that Madonna would want to express her experience and yearning and interaction of the divine with male symbols and patriarchy.

I am reminded of these situations by thinking about the discussions around women in leisure cultures now.

Most of my female pagan friends at the time admired her for owning her sexuality on her terms instead of exclusivley make defined ones. It's hard to remember now when all of her bits have been co-opted and digested and third wave feminism exists but what she was doing was self-defined.  In retrospect she might be the only mainstream popular act to do that because after her came the two terms to minimize discussion of sexuality or women in cultural consumption "Attention Whore" for those who incorporated their sexuality their persona and "White Knight" for any male who might defend pretty much any woman with a public persona. You can't discuss anything that uses sex and bodies in performance or marketing without having the labels thrown around for chilling effect.

It's still hard for women to admit their sexuality or discuss fluctuations in it without it falling into some pre-packaged trope. Madonna managed to be self defined until very, very recently. When she hit fifty the "cougar" became a sexual stereotype for women who were somewhere between milfs and crones. She and Dr. Ruth Westheimer were my early models for empowered women talking about sex on their terms to other women and whatever men cared to listen, but not for men. Really for them. For us, for little, evenutally growing up, me.

The other Madonna song I liked was "live to tell" .

Madonna is complicated, she's a social signifier, I was waiting, really to find out what would happen next. The two albums of hers I bought because I liked them and they actually spoke to me were Ray of Light and Music.

Most of those songs still speak to me. She's writing about subjects that mean something. By the time they came out while people were very confused and starting to spread crazy rumors about what Kabaalah was ( hint it's not it's own religion and SURPRISE Catholisicim has it's own Kabbalah ) no one by that time would be surprised that her work contained religion and sex intermingled, and even if they thought it was her shtick, most people actually assumed that she probably meant it, even if they now judged her for being crazy.

Of all of the Madonna songs that fill up the cultural soundtrack of my life the one that I hear in the back of my head when I'm very, very still is the one that has these lines:

"When you're trying hard to be your best, could you be a little less"

Does anyone even know that song? Is it one of the ones that get forgotten because it's uncomfortable?

I don't actually play the song through at all. Over the last several years it's made me cry. Mostly because it's true. It's actually the only song or article or anything addressing the topic that feels like what I feel. She wrote it when she was approaching 40.

When you open up your mouth to speak
Could you be a little weak?


But she's not 40 anymore, she's 50 and when she was at the superbowl some other, very brave self defined woman who I admire for all the same reasons I admire Madonna wrote how disappointing it was that she was not embracing her age and seemed to be trying to reach backwards or fight aging in her superbowl performances.

And I wrote back to that woman through the lightness of tweeting that

it's hard 4 someone like me 2 figure out how 2 age in a way that's true 2 self. It must be x1000 for Madonna

And that performer agreed enough to retweet - amplifying my struggle and empathy to ALL of her followers who are quite dedicated. And I found myself worrying a tiny bit if there was a cost to defending something as nebulous as that fact that maybe it's just Madonna's turn to look around for who she is and how to be and find out nothing that fits. She can be sexual, and maternal, and flawed, and perfect and performing because ALL of our age and gender presentations are a performance.

And everyone is watching but the roles are narrowed. How do we explore the space? When do we admit that the construct of a public persona is just as authentic as the personal persona?

The difference is in the size of the audience, but here in the age of the internet all of our performance is the size of internationally sold out stadiums. We are all at the risk of suddenly being judged by the same number of people that will judge Madonna, just for a shorter period of time.

But that's a big thing to risk. We might trip up.

Other things are bubbling up right now about being a female and being in the now. This is it for this one though

"Do you know what it feels like for a girl"

Do we even admit what if feels like when we are still considered "girls" when we're looking to define ourselves post childrearing. Madonna was 40. Girl is much more complicated for me than bitch. I want to both claim and supersede it so that I can be seen as a whole person in the communities I operate in. But if I don't claim "girl" all of my tribe become slightly less visible ( even if I occasionally disagree with large percentages of that tribe).

You know what my male friends don't do? They don't refer to themselves as "boys".

I"m not sure I have an answer, I'm sure that this isn't my last exploration of this theme.

I am sure I want to dance.

Hineni

Part 5 - The Nature of Books and Business - A Tour of the Books in My Bedroom

Exciting things are happening in the world outside the Dreamtime, and as is custom the more time you spend with Meatworld things the less time you have in the Dreamtime.

Everything has a balance, everything has a cost. The loss of momentum with the tour echoes the loss of momentum for solving the issues that led to the book collecting in their home in the first place and now it is time to return to the Books in the Bedroom - specifically the Stack of Books Next to the Hidden Bookshelf.

A quick recap is in order -

In Part 1 I explain why I'm thinking about books in their physical and e-book forms and what they mean and why I'm writing the tour

In Part 2 I tour the Books that Became Decor and was startled to find that many of them were decor because I didn't really like them much

In Part 3 I tour the Stack of Books Under the Window - which are primarily hardcovers and discuss the system by which books were supposed to enter and leave the bedroom

In Part 4 I tour the Books in the Hidden Bookshelf and the history of bookshelves in my former bedrooms and the place of books in my house and my emotional landscape. I even surprised me.

Part 5 is this one - it's not terribly long.

Section 1 - The Poetry of What Remains

Stacked exactly as they are, the books create a poem of their own. A scarily accurate one:

The line between

the Receiving

Wandering Stars making money

Selling the Invisible a Mind at a time

Words on Fire: One woman's journey into the Sacred

The Queen's Bastard

"XXXholic" The Unicorn Sonata

Of course the actual titles by themselves are less connected:

The Line Between - by Peter S. Beagle

The Receiving : Reclaiming Jewish Women's Wisdom by Rabbi Tzirah Firestone

Wandering Stars - An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Fiction edited by Jack Dann ( I didn't enjoy it much)

Making Money - by Terry Prachett

Selling the Invisible -

A Mind at a Time -by Mel Levine

Words on Fire - One Woman's Journey into the Sacred - by Vanessa L Ochs

The Queens Bastard - by C.E. Murphy ( this was not my kind of book at all, I think it came into the house by way of The Girl)

XxxHolic Volume 12 by Clamp (The three X's are a mathematic variable not the the standard English Usage of the triple x in media)

The Unicorn Sonata by Peter S. Beagle

Section 2 - How did they get there?

The Peter S. Beagle books were books I purchased directly from him at the event where I met the Poppets, which, on reflection was 2008 not 2009 as I previously estimated. I had his books from that event in the pile of "to be read" on my night table. They are non-standard sized beautifully illustrated books.

Words on Fire and The Receiving were books I was reading to put a historical context on the role I was trying to create spiritually in my organized religion. They were a way of understanding the barriers that I was experiencing as a Meatworld woman trying to fuse what the religion actually meant with the way it was practiced. Words On Fire is how I feel about studying Torah and Talumd. The words of Torah and Talmud are the real Ner Tamid ( eternal light) represented by the continuos light infront of the Aron Khodesh (the fancy box we keep the torah scrolls in at synagoge). Words alone can burn you up. Practice and application in the Meatworld makes you confront the reality of those words.

In my religion, as in many others, that struggle is usually written and recorded by men, and they declare women as "more spiritual" or "closer to God" and "excuse" them from the extra work of learning and studying because they "don't need it". In reality, to be able to study and be transported by those fiery words, or see them as anything other than fairy stories or literal instruction ( both of which are huge mistakes in Judaism) you need someone taking care of the kids, the businesses, and the laundry. All of the work to create the ritual meals, ritual spaces and transportive theater has to be done by someone whose eyes aren't burning with spirit but whose hands are busy polishing the silver and cooking the festive meal before the deadline so those holy, holy men can come in and be transported.

To no one's surprise those busy hands belong to the "more spiritual" women so the "weak" men can go learn and feel and do.

There has always been a deep spirituality to the women's work because of the way Judiaism is constructed, and literacy is required of all Jews including women's Torah Study. but it has frequently been denied or denigrated by the men who write the "serious" religious works. It's changing, but not from the outside, not by adding to it, but from the inside from uncovering things. There is in Catholicism something called a "sin of omission" and Jewish theology and educational traditions are rife with it. It's not that learned women didn't exist, it's just that periodically their history, commentary and contributions just got edited out as irrelevant or ignored as unbelievable. Judaic authorities don't really get rid of anything though and as society needed less back breaking labor just to get through a day of meal preparation women started asking questions and found documentation and we're still trying to sort it out. I'm in that sorting it out place.

Judaism works best for me with a lot of spirituality and intent, and a moderate amount of organized religion, but I found the more I actually cared about the spiritual part the less the organized part was working for me. In synagogue people who were more spiritual than I was were also more set in their patterns of thinking, but people who practiced the way that I did weren't really looking at the words with their little crowns in the Torah and seeing the fire.

Dealing with The Girl's illness was making me less social and more confused. It was unpleasant for me to go to shul. Those books came into the House for me to hear other women's voices. The words were burning me, the people were scarring me, these books helped cool things down for my fevered brain.

The book A Mind at A Time is about dealing with non-standard brains, completely Meatworld, given to me by another parent of another child with a different cause but similar presentation. It's painful for me to read it. I've read chapters, I skip around. It's still in the bedroom because it's a good, important book but unfinished. Words and The Reciving are still in the bedroom because I am unfinished. A Mind at A Time in in the bedroom because I'm still in denial about the darker years of The Girl's illness.

Selling the Invisible is a book about advertising but I've found it really useful as a project manager and someone who champions process solutions. It also helps make some sense of the constant barrage of overt and subliminal marketing we are exposed to constantly, not in a cynical anti-consumerist manner but in understanding the place of services and ideas in a capitalistic market place and how to position them and yourself in relation to them. It keeps coming back into the bedroom because I keep referencing it in other things. Somwhere in it I keep thinking there is a synergy between needs/desires and usability. That sweet spot between design, process, and end user. It's not in an obvious place but I keep glimpsing it obliquely, and I keep going back to it for that reason.

Section 3 - The Business and Nature Part

None of these books would have been obtained as e-books, they all have stories behind them and some were gifted or recommended. Some were purchased specifically to support the author. Some were because I would only find what I was looking for from people who had already tried to answer some of the same questions. The Beagle books were new, the rest were purchased used.

Undeniably, they are a snapshot to the six months they represent - I was struggling with the after effects of being the parent of a seriously ill child, my place in my religion and my ability to present transformative suggestions to my workplace. Intermixed with shadows of the world I used to walk in comfortably, the Pratchett and the Beagle work being things I fell into. It was important to remember humor and fantasy and at the time I was working through all the other books, I possibly lost track of the lightness of both.

The next entry will be The Books I'm Getting Ready to Read, and they will include the e-books that have been purchased between the start of this series and Part 6. Then we can talk about what it means to support your author between e-books and physical books

When It Matters

There is a school of thought that when in a situation of subservience, such as a teacher/student relationship, one should "go along to get along."

How one should go along depends on what the teacher wants or your goal.

If taking the the class to reach a larger goal - like a degree or a certain GPA, going along means studying the teacher, figuring out what that teacher most values and doing it, modifying ( but not compromising) what you most value until they fit.

That is valuable. It teaches you a life skill and lets you learn, both what the teacher has to offer and what you can do to work with others who are not exactly like you. Because no one is exactly like you. Ever. No matter how hard you try, or how much nothing you have done is new -- no one is ever, ever exactly like you.

Sometimes that can be very lonely if you think about it too long, which is why people daydream about having a twin, or a perfect mate, or a magic hat that knows you better than you know yourself.

But sometimes what the teacher wants is thinking and open debate and that of course is where the trouble starts . . . . .

There is a Book - inside the book is a chapter that describes interactivity. I do not disagree with the book, but I strongly disagree with it's tone.

That tone indicates that one should not really pay attention to what non-designers say - they are just BSing because they don't understand what you are saying. It glorifies the fact that everything is NEW and even LANGUAGE is changing. Students and youth will see solutions that experienced designers will never ever see. Because they are "Designosaurs".

No really. The only sop to the poor, old, decrepit, artists and designers who work in traditional media is something where these evangelicals of digital design concede that the usage of the term "conventional designers" is somewhat condescending ( and a term I've never heard used in a professional context "traditional" being the term I've heard used when referrring to non-digital media. )

Understood. Youth, anarchy and open source software tools for creating digital media is where "all" the "credibility" is. But that's not design to me - that's masturbation. The most I will give it is that it is public masturbation.

Here is the thing, design, and please understand that I mean DESIGN not ART is about interaction. A designer is creating something to be used, a form, an application, an object, a theory, and the goal is for PEOPLE to use it. If they don't, or can't, or won't; it might be beautiful, it might even be art, but it fails as design.

Design - what does it mean anyway - let's get long and referencey about it - Design according to the Oxford Dictionary is about planning and the act of planning - it references art but is not art

Pronunciation:

/dɪˈzʌɪn/

noun

1 a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is made: he has just unveiled his design for the new museum



[mass noun] the art or action of conceiving of and producing a plan or drawing of something before it is made: good design can help the reader understand complicated information



[mass noun] the arrangement of the features of an artefact, as produced from following a plan or drawing:inside , the design reverts to turn-of-the-century luxe



2 a decorative pattern: pottery with a lovely blue and white design



3 [mass noun] purpose or planning that exists behind an action, fact, or object: the appearance of design in the universe



Nope - no part there where one of the things you should be learning about is how it's OK if "some people just don't get it".

So what about when design is a verb - is that the part where we look for the higher ground of artistic integrity?

verb

[with object]

1. decide upon the look and functioning of (a building, garment, or other object), by making a detailed drawing of it:a number of architectural students were designing a factory

(as adjective, with submodifier designed) specially designed buildings


2. do or plan (something) with a specific purpose in mind:[with object and infinitive] :the tax changes were designed to stimulate economic growth



Ummn nope - not there either.

So gentle readers, artists, and consumers - because I know that design is the incredibly unsexy thing you have to do to execute art for mass consumption and digital design in particular must be meant to be seen by unexpected audiences you will forgive me for making the mistake of thinking an example given in my textbook of the effects of a piece of interactive art was an example of design having unpredictable as opposed to desirable effects.

There is an artists group called Antenna and they created the Power Flower art installation. It's really really cool. It goes for a certain length of space and as you walk past your movement and energy activate a flower and it glows blue. When they first put it up as the book describes it a small child understood it very quickly and started interacting (playing) with the art right away but this poor old lady never understood the connection between her movement and proximity to the light because she wasn't moving in a speed or manner that connected the sudden glowing blue light with anything at all and was just irritated by what seemed to her to be a sporadic bath of blue light for no apparent reason.

Now the book went out of it's way to point out the ages of the participants in this early version of the installation - and perhaps it wouldn't have seemed so ageist (see old people don't get it!) if it hadn't been glorifying the young every fourth sentence or so. But even with that I thought - Awesome! It's obviously a design issue - if the goal is to "create delight" and there's a problem with getting some group to interact with it then how could you change the design so that it would reach a wider group to create that effect?

Because that's what you should do in a design class right?

Well apparently my fellow students felt that this example was "proof that you can't please everyone all the time".

No. No it wasn't.

And so because we were required to actually engage each other in an online discussion board I engaged - politely and explained that public art shouldn't be cutting out an entire segment of the public on purpose and was getting angrier and angrier that the consensus was that maybe "women over 60" weren't part of the target audience, so there was nothing wrong with the design.

Ladies and Gentlemen - the work was commissioned for the windows of Bloomingdales in New York City, I propose that the target audience is DISPROPORTIONATELY women over 60.

The artists I might point out - changed the design and added a musical tone which creates more of a point of connectivity so the connection of progressive sound becomes another point of entry into the work to create "unexpected delight".

Here is the work:

And I am happy to report that the actual artists have a much better attitude than the "artists" in my design class:

But I wonder - if the young and artistic are continously told there is more value in their point of view than the older and more experienced designer how will they ever manage to reach anyone with empathy if they also hold the idea that either art or design is meant to be exclusionary.

It matters.

It matters enough to speak out in class and run the risk of offending someone's comfort zone and being "that guy".

If the old lady realizes that the flowers interact with her movement and thinks "that's lame" then she doesn't like the art. That's OK - you really can't please everyone. If she never figures out that her actions have anything to do with the flowers or the light then she doesn't have an opinion on the art all - she never experienced it to have one.

It's the designer's job to make sure that she can form an opinion.

Sigh. There really wasn't a choice, but now I am absolutely "that guy". And that was before this week's mangling of the "Hockey Stick" graphic and Climategate to make it seem like graphic designers were accused fo taking bribes because visual design is THAT POWERFUL.

But the gentleman in the discussion insisted that nothing was wrong with the installation if it didn't reach people and even when given the location and the fact that it was public defended the idea of it just being the "fault" of the audience demographic and left off with "we'll just have to respectfully disagree".

No we won't - we can politely disagree.

But the respect is pretty much gone.

The gentleman in question had none for the public and reserved it for the artist, which much eroded mine. I don't know any working artists with that attitude.

But the exchange was polite - and tempered with the fact that he doesn't see it as disrespect and there's nothing in the book to convince him to respect those poor beleaguered people who are not new or anarchistic or devoted to blowing off management.

That was the compromise - the going along to get along - because had he been my friend or co-worker I would have called him out on it - and less politely than I did online.

I'm going to go play the interview with the artists again so I can remember the really important stuff in art and design.

Always Time

Completed Work.

Digital Fine art homework Complete! (5 other assignments left waiting)

This is it - 3 Logic Tests and 2 Java Programs to go . . .

Poppet with Paisley

The Black Box

When you enter the box , first you see the lights and then the floor and then the curtains – maybe.

When you enter the box first you see the black and then the lights - sometimes.

When I entered the black box I smelled the black.

Oh. Yes, of course. Here are the curtains, the boxes, the scruffed floor that proves it’s true.

When you enter the box it is a trial, a transformation, a test.

It is for everyone. Move. Reach. Feel.

Hurt. Scream. Love. Stretch. Know.

Show.

In the black box I learn how far my puzzle pieces are from the center of my snap apple puzzle. I am marked and measured in my native language that goes deeper than the words.

Oh. Right. Sorry I forgot. I didn’t mean to. I thought I was doing the right thing, Stop apologizing? Ok sorry, I mean . . . never mind. I’ll practice quiet now.

We stand in a circle at readiness. The knees are slightly bent, the hands are loose, the feet need to be ready to spring forward. We are trying to learn telepathy.

My body and mind remember, and slide easily to that place, aware from the center seeing/not seeing. Almost. It is almost easy. I can no longer see behind me. I shut that down when I wasn’t in the box. Here in the circle now it feels like a withered arm being asked to lift.

I try not to hate myself for that.

When we are one we need to leave the ground. We need to leave it knees up, like a spring letting go of the ground not a piston showing that we are leaving it. We need to surprise gravity, not defy it. We need telepathy, not show and tell, to leave it.

I know exactly when we are supposed to release the floor and how we are supposed to address the air. The mind and the body send the signal and the meat and the muscles say no.

Split seconds – speed of thought.

My will is stronger than the meat and the muscles, but gravity is not surprised. I go up but barely. It’s a victory. A quiet one.

It shouldn't have been a battle.

The other 11 are trying to understand the place where all thought is no thought. I know that place – I fall back there like a bead in a well oiled groove, but those hard fought four inches – straight back, knees up, no bounce –was a ten year war played out in the space of that neuron-synapse interaction.

Here is the trick to telepathy in the black box, the fact that you have to focus is a given, but it will only work if you actually care. Right now- this first day – it is still a child’s game to them.

The Black Box though, is the entire world to me.

I’ve just spent a lot of time pretending that it’s not. Enough time for gravity to stake a higher claim on the meat, but the black still has my soul. It’s my alphabet.

It doesn’t take much for the Black Box to strip me down past the excuses, measure the damage. It exposes things caught between the lights and the floor.

So much more complicated than Scylla and Charybdis

You don't choose between them here in the scent of the light warmed black. You stand in the center and become the third thing.

And all the Men and Women Merely Players

Sometimes, it's not the loss that causes the melancholy, it's the effort needed to rebuild.

There are things I thought I put away, not childish things in any form, but passionate ones. I played with little shadow versions of them, like puppet show passion plays. Those would/could/should be enough.

"Passion - Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Late Latinpassion-, passio suffering, being acted upon, from Latin pati to suffer."

Isn't it funny how we've taken a word whose meaning is based on suffering and changed it into a kind of ecstatic frenzy - a euphemism for sexual love? A desire for more passion in our lives or our marriages takes on a whole different meaning when you bring it back to the root. Ultimately a possibly unhealthy meaning.

I was passionate about a boy once. When I look back on it, it seems like a derangement. Every moment was vibrant and alive with possibility, unpredictability, intese joy, intense sorrow. In the throes of passion doesn't mean the bedroom - it means all of the time you are controlled by this passion whatever it is, who ever it is based on. The connection to the suffering is real and immediate, everything else seems shallow and chalky and gray. Only the things related to what or who is the center of the passion seem real and bright. Everything is just something that leads you to the chance to surrender, to participate in that presence or action again. All the times you are not near or engaged are all the "moments before". The time of suffering while waiting to see what passion will bring. As poor fools in the throes of it all, we will call it many, many, things and we will try to use that word "passion" to make it fit those other, safer things.

But it will still be passion.

I got over the boy. If he even remembers me now he will remember our time together very differently than I do. Passion is a kind of insanity. You cannot build a life on it. Not the real kind where you don't die young, or end up stabbed 23 times by Senate.

Passion based on a person is by nature transient. The idea of suffering because I am not near someone if foreign to my understanding of love. When I am alone and I am loved, I am happy because I know my love for the other person is not based on proximity but security. I love them just as deeply two continents away, or two hemispheres away as I do when I am next to them, when we are entangled together. Distance is nothing to love. Love is like Damascus steel to me - tools we share, my beloved and I so that we can build and fight and defend to and craft together.

All of my beloved - family, lover, children - I am not passionate about them. The greeks who separated love: agape, eros, phillia, storge, they missed a word or category for this kind of love. Maybe "storge" but it didn't make it into a lot of literature, (possibly because it doesn't lead to tragic or comedic actions). But it is not passion.

I was passionate about an artform once. I had convinced myself that I could use the past tense. I could learn from it and chuckle with fond memories and traumatic ones and move on.

I am utterly and devastatingly wrong.

The tense is present tense. It's much stronger than a simple passion for a boy. Everyone knew it then. People who knew me later knew it still. People who know me now got glimpses when I played with the shadow versions. Then I stopped playing with those. Now the people in my life are blissfully ignorant of it. All was quiet on the passion front. Not the modern one with it's garish calls to buy things at Victoria's Secret or the pretty religious ones trying to create some form of agape with ritual and structure. Those puny passions are fine. I put aside the suffering. I became an audience ( for the first time?)

For those around me it was a good call. True Roman Stoicism for the good of the community and all that. There is a reason after all that they call it "suffering for one's art" and it is pretty obvious that great artists that could truly be brave for art or scientists (those monomaniacs of discovery) always had someone supporting them or no ties at all. But if you are the support - parent, breadwinner, wife - your art is best something to be dabbled with, shown proudly by offspring or spouse when visitors come to call. Art for Art's sake as long as it causes no one else any inconvenience.

And I believed that so completely that I didn't even realize I wasn't putting things together, I was breaking them apart. Or maybe breaking me apart.

So now - when I checked the recent damage of self and current competencies - all of the ways I used to take inventory and maintain and repair had failed. Not because they were bad systems, but because I had used them up. They were finite measures meant for specific or surface damage. They worked bravely and well for over a decade. They are simply the wrong tools. There to fix- like love, not to upset and destroy and recreate - like passion.

That's not enough. Love does not conquer all, it cannot heal by itself and sometimes you can't fix things unless you break them a bit first. Maybe I needed to break them alot.

And so with a long hard look at what was broken, I stood on a crossroad with a different devil on every choice. I blinked instead, and refused the road alone. I invited the devils to follow me but I needed to go back. Or down. Everything that was wrong - all the pieces damaged, and battered and missing - I thought I had learned them in other places, through life or jobs or school or relationships and simple survival. That was the mistake. I had learned them all in theater.

All of them. Every last one.

Dammit.

Now I'm awake. The question is what am I going to do about it?

There are four devils following me to school. Dionysus is laughing behind them because they don't realize they're pulling the chariot. I'm hoping that Minerva is travelling with him.

We'll try not burn or break too much.

****

Passion - Date: 13th century

1 often capitalized a : the sufferings of Christ between the night of the Last Supper and his death b : an oratorio based on a gospel narrative of the Passion
2 obsolete : suffering
3 : the state or capacity of being acted on by external agents or forces
4 a(1) : emotion (2) plural : the emotions as distinguished from reason b : intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction c : an outbreak of anger
5 a : ardent affection : love b : a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept c : sexual desire d : an object of desire or deep interest

passion applies to an emotion that is deeply stirring or ungovernable passions.

The Taunting - Cheapass Edition

Do you all remember The Taunting? It is my family's personalization of our Americanized Holiday celebration.

As time goes on and I study more, I am harboring a secret suspicion that Judah and the Macabees became a macho male veneer on a holiday that had been celebrated by Jews previously that celebrated Judith. I've done a presentation on Judith in art and history- she is fascinating in the mixed up worlds of art history and political history . . . . but that is another truly wonky, geeky, potentially controversial story - for another time and perhaps a different audience.

Questions like Judith burn through my brain - but the someone to tear through the questions with me, well that doesn't work out so well. Their brain would have to be burning too. It's tied up with Western religion and history and art and the role of women and the values of monarchy. Too complicated, to much trust needed to have the conversation. No one wants to play with me. . . . .

So my fevered brain and I put all of our energy into the Taunting instead. And indeed, Channuka snuck up on us this year, and I "lost" my job 4 days before it started, (it's not lost, just ending in a few weeks, but in the Meatworld the effect is the same) and I was far too optimistic about time estimates for some artwork I was trying to do. So as a result the Taunting was planned, but the execution was not out of Phase II:Find Key Elements. Phase I is Create The Theme.

Every year at the beginning of Channuka, I put all of the presents out at the first candle. They are numbered, there are 8 for each child (who aren't so childish anymore) and each present is a clue. Every Taunting has a Major Theme, and every night has a Minor Theme. You have to open the presents in order. The "big" present is always the 8th Candle.

The wrapping is part of the Theme - and last year it was Poppets. And Chinese Takeout Containers - My sister was the one to get the wrapping theme. It's an in joke. But this year, we opted for The Taunting - Slacker Edition:

As you can see things were ordered and arriving - instead of hiding the packages as they came in I stacked them all in front of the portal mirror and set the Poppets from Last Year's Taunting to guard them.

The Slacker Taunting actually is related to a legendary event called Slacker Camp. When My Perfectly Normal Husband was simply My Accountant Who I Brought With Me to the Desert, Because You Only Bring The Things You Really Need, we set up very elaborate, generous interactive performance art and helped everyone who needed it with their own.

Then we went to a local event about 3 -4 weeks later and brought everything we needed and enough for lot of other people, and offered to share and give instructions but only performed the barest minimum needed. Those who had known us from the other events saw the art in it, and those who had just met us thought it was a brilliant conceit while they ate the steaks that we brought but they cooked.

It was interesting for us, because we are people who do, and help, and plan, and execute. It taught us things like letting go of complete control, and that if we give that out into the world, good people who are fun to hang out with will come to us and give us their enegry, work and company. However I must admit - we were only willing to do Slacker Camp once. It's not our nature.

So the same way Slacker Camp was not conducted in a vaccum, The Taunting - Cheapass Edition was also held within the context of Tauntings gone by. Good traditions grow new stories.

When the first Box arrived it was approximately 4 feet tall and 5 inches square and I had no time to unpack it so it stayed in the livingroom and I declared that the Cheapass Taunting had begun. The Boy asked if it was one gift but it actually contained several - it would take me three days to be able to get enough time to unpack it. The Taunting had begun! It Taunted me too.

On the First Candle I had a lovely stack of Amazon Boxes. ( because I'm a Prime Member and they deliver in two days with free shipping for me) and a few boxes from other places.

First Candle also happened to be Shabbat and it was such a Slacker Channuka that I hadn't bought candles for the Channukia ( menorahs) so we scavenged the leftovers from previous years.

However The Skeleton That Want's To Run A Florist Shop came up with a backup plan.

He likes to arrange things. He gathered a group of the minis and they put together Poppets Pretending to be a Menorah.

See - the mini wizard's wand is pretending to be the first candle and Wind is the Shamesh.

I reused the Chinese Food Gift Containers from last year's Taunting. See Slacker Channaka is Green!

We lit the regular candles, The Boy got a timepiece and The Girl got recycled kimono fabric made into fabulous shoelaces, which in turn ended up looking a lot like something Mini Poppets should dance with.

So they did.

Last year it was the Calender that caused Chaos because of the Great Holiday Overlap. This year the Chaos came because I was tricked into believing in The Week That Was Not There. But just you wait Calendar . . . . I'll get you my pretty, and your little ticking minutes too.

The Taunting can be messed with, but it cannot be stopped.

We emerged from the eight days victorious - The next entry or two will tell the story.

World Fantasy Con - Collaboration Happens

Here is what is now officially titled " The House Where Halloween Things Live When It Isn't Halloween"

This is a picture when it was still in front of Poppetropolis Proper.

(Poppetropolis is the area in NYC where the Embarrassed Embassy is based, it's like Chinatown, or Little Italy but where all the expats from Poppet Planet live).

The Embarrassed Embassy is not yet a year old - but it's 1st anniversary will be soon. Like many construction projects in many cities, it has undergone some changed scope and is behind schedule. It is part and parcel of my reaction to Lisa's art. Lisa and others have told me that my reaction to her work is art. I'm still struggling a little with that.

But it is what it is.

In September, when she asked if I would do something with her for Halloween, I said yes. I had an idea that didn't belong to Poppetropolis and it would be more fun to do it with her. Then later we decided to bring it to the World Fantasy Convention and debut it there. Which is really grand but a little scary because we hadn't met in the Meatworld.

And so we got to explore a little of the surreality of our relationship and reaction to each other. There is no question that we had a relationship, but it was in the new ether of the internet, which is not the same as in person. We were now collaborating cross country, but the first voice contact we had was a phone call to let her know I was at the hotel.

We had emailed and shipped and consulted, and had pictures of each other and, I think a place in each other's lives, ( unbalanced, but equally real) and yet we were still introducing ourselves to each other, but we do know things.

One of the things we knew, is that we were both people who had been involved with conventions before. This ended up being a very useful thing over the weekend. I helped with the set up, I was very happy to be useful. I am always happier when I'm useful.

We set up the art show together and talked while we did. Here are the pictures of most of it without the bid sheets - for posterity . .

The sculpture in the center of this shot is called Blackbirds, and I believe Lisa will be making an 8ft version of it in the next year.

I was not the only person who travelled from distant coasts however, Lisa met with a Poppet Collector from Australia, who asked for a picture of the Poppet that Has Travelled to Australia and Back and the Creator of Poppets.

She is a wonderful lady and an excellent dinner companion. She was actually Queen of Australia and New Zealand, so I was honored by her Poppet's acceptance of an invitation to visit The House Where Halloween Things Live. This marks the first Visiting Poppet to that House.

He is an Outside Steampunk Poppet.

Here he is being greeted by Elul, who made the trip out to show off the House along with two of the Jackos and about 10 other East Coast Expats.

The Australian Outside Steampunk Poppet converses with the Raven and peruses the House Where Halloween Things Live Library.

Of course there was Poe. The book on the table is The Purloined Letter.

Many things happened at World Fantasy Con, I'm still sorting a bunch of it out. I'll write about it while I'm processing it. I have funny anecdotes, and weird ones, and serious ones. I will probably not tell them all. I have anecdotes that involve food:

Anecdotes of Lisa and the Poppet who lives on her desk.

Our mutual love of coffee.

and what it means when people ask you questions like "What do you do?" or "Don't I know you" or "What do you want out of this."

And of course the big one "Why are you doing this"

I think I have begun to have an answer for that last one -

I used to process all the things I couldn't say through words, but I put the words aside. It stopped being safe.

I used to use all the things I felt to communicate, when I was wearing the skin of someone else, so the personal could become universal. It was like breathing, but I learned how to hold my breath and now I cannot exhale.

I used to build things to create small worlds or hold other worlds at bay. I'm still doing that.

The words are too complex, the feelings are too deep to show in someone else's skin, I may have spent to much time trapped in my own. I can't use the older tools I have to process what happens to me when I react to Lisa's art. So I'm building things to help me understand my own reactions. I'm building things to share and show what's going on on the inside.

I'm having trouble telling the story, so I'm building it instead.

It's a stealth story, I've hidden it inside things you might use to tell your own.

And if you see or play with something I've built, then you're wearing my skin, sharing my world which is all ajumble and full of art. So it shouldn't surprise me at all that there are Poppets there.

I am just a little (very!) surprised that other people like it too.

The thing is, I would make it anyway. I don't think I could not make it.

Maybe that makes it art after all.