Friday, March 27, 2009

I like this photo.



I took it at my desk yesterday. I have really big hair. I was trying to look like Brigitte Bardot in an old movie. I was wearing my ballet flats, a printed full skirt and a sweater set. And liquid eyeliner.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

A list of random objects?

1. Venus in Furs
2. Yellow cashmere sweater, argyle pattern
3. Two silk bow ties, four pair silk knot cufflinks
4. Ferdinand, the Flower-Smelling Bull.
5. Burgundy flats, spectator style
6. Rubber riding boots
7. Velvet dress, vintage, sleeveless sheath, the color of old theatre seats
8. Ballet pink 3/4 sleeve top
9. A little fur piece -- dyed rabbit?
10. Blue jeans skirt
11. Chocolate brown nail polish, greenish-black eye shadow
12. Waterman pen
13. French Foreign Legion button, beribboned

It's a kind of Joseph Cornell assemblage of the wardrobe.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Facebook is truly evil.

I really don't have anything to write here. Too much "Six Degrees of Separation" research to do on facebook at the moment. And too much flair to make and send to people. I am seriously addicted. I love to make things on the internet.

A "six degrees" facebook example: it turns out one of my former students is friends with someone who was an undergraduate in art school with me during the last century...

Monday, March 23, 2009

Plath's Son Commits Suicide

...in Alaska

Associated Press

Monday, 23 March 2009

Nicholas Hughes, the son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has killed himself. His death was 46 years after his mother committed suicide and almost 40 years to the day after his stepmother, Assia Wevill, did the same. He was 47.

Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself at his home on 16 March, Alaska State Troopers said. An evolutionary biologist, he spent more than a decade on the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Marmian Grimes, the university's senior public information officer, said he left about a year ago.

Hughes' older sister, poet Frieda Hughes, issued a statement through The Times, expressing her "profound sorrow" and saying that he "had been battling depression for some time."

Nicholas Hughes was only 9 months old when his parents separated, and still an infant when his mother died in February 1963. A few months earlier, she had written of Nicholas: "You are the one/Solid the spaces lean on, envious/You are the baby in the barn."

Not widely known when she died, Plath became a cult figure and feminist martyr through the novel "The Bell Jar," which told of a suicidal young woman, and through the "Ariel" poems she had been working on near the end of her life.

The immediate cause of their breakup was Ted Hughes' affair with Wevill, and Plath's fame would long haunt her husband, hounded for years by women who believed he was responsible for her suicide and by a procession of scholars and fans obsessed with the brief, impassioned and tragic marriage between the two poets.

Ted Hughes would relive the tragedy not only through the constant reminders of Plath, but also through the suicide of Wevill, his second wife, who in March 1969 killed herself and their four-year-old daughter.

Hughes, England's poet laureate, was reluctant to discuss Plath until near the end of his life when he published the best-selling "Birthday Letters," a collection of deeply personal poems that came out in 1998. He died of cancer the same year.

Gay Bi Gay Gay

...is where I spent yesterday. It was pretty fab. It's the gay/bi/trans/? version of SXSW. Imagine Woodstock in someone's backyard in East Austin (the ghetto) filled with typical Austin pierced/tattoo'd funky-clothes wearin' folk with live bands taking the stage every hour. Jimmie and Cindy were face painting there and I had had the little girls, feeding them lunch, taking them swimming, for the earlier part of the day before I delivered them back to their adults. It was fun. I saw people I haven't seen for twenty years in some cases. And all my former daughter-in-laws. And all Jimmie's former housemates. Old Home Week.

I can see that facebook is going to be a major competitor for my leisure time and blogging here. I can't get over all the gift applications people have created. I was sent "the line between past and present" from the Grey Gardens Treasures by a friend. And I spent the better part of the past two days on the site making flair (buttons) to send friends. The first set was Art School Stuff (Duchamp readymades, Surrealists) and the second set was Cross-Dressing Female Movie Stars (Katharine Hepburn, Dietrich, Garbo, Brooks, Moreau, etc.). I like the "play time" aspect of facebook more than the social networking part. Evidently everyone is up in arms about a recent redesign, but since I just got on it last Thursday, it's fine with me. Downside is you can only write about a hundred characters in each post, keeping it short and sweet. Guess I still need the blog to totally unburden my wordy self.