art is the new religion

Happiness is a Hammond

I found this video on Jessica Hopper's blog, one of my all time favorite blogs which I've read regularly for a few years now.  I don't know this Candy Lawrence, but in less than two minutes she's summed up a great deal of how I feel about music, dancing, and happiness.

Thank you, Candy Lawrence.

The hoop, the hoop, the hoop is on fire!

Last Tuesday night, my dear friend - we'll call her "Plenty" in this context - took me out to the park in the dark and showed me something astounding.

Around 9:30pm, we loaded up the trunk of her car with fuel and props and drove out to a very specific location in Golden Gate Park.  We loaded up our arms with gear and towels and buckets and she led me into a thicket of trees.  It was so dark I could hardly see my own feet on the uneven steps down the sloping hill.  Follwing the sound of two drummers and a smattering of voices, we arrived at a clearing where I could make out shapes of a few other people in the darkness.  Then people started lighting up:

Fire dancers from http://krissy.vox.com/

Fire dancers meet here every week to practice and perform.  There were people spinning poi, hooping, dancing with fans and lances, and generally playing with fire.  There is something primal and mesmerizing about this kind of dancing.

Spinning from http://krissy.vox.com/

Plenty took her first poi class only around a year ago.  I'm astounded by how much she's learned so quickly.  Here she is spinning poi - she's the one in the red tank top.

Plenty spins poi from http://krissy.vox.com/

This past January, Plenty took up hooping.  You're probably familiar with the hula hoop, but you may never have seen it used like this:

Plenty and the hoop from http://krissy.vox.com/

Plenty's now teaching hoop classes, and I've been to two classes in a month-long series.  The hoops we learn with are heavier and sturdier than the one I had as a kid, so I have various bruises on my legs and hands.  But the class is so fun that it's worth the pain!  So far I've learned these moves: lasso, grab, flirt, bump. 

I have no intention to ever fire dance myself, but I do like to watch.

Dangerous, stressful, glittering, burning

On fire.

There is so much going on that I never talk about.  There is so much going on inside me that I never express.  I feel it all and never say it out loud.  Not that I'd say any of these things - if and when I got a wild hair to say them - on my blog.  I'm just talking about the not-talking, here.  Maybe that's why I want to write a novel someday - I can write it all down and attribute it to fictional characters.

My friend Erin started a blog called That Makes One Of Us.  I'm feeling it.  She's writing poetry:

...I

see you in imagination

where

my heart's a box of red crayons

where blue ghosts come to draw

and

my heart's a bumper sticker

that says

if you can read this, you're too close

and I

laugh.

Few things move me like a really good poem does.

I'm feeling love from my friends who play around with me and put up with me.  And I'm feeling Sarah's photography.

I'm feeling curious. 
I'm feeling inspired. 
I'm feeling sideways.

What's the worst that could happen?

BEAT IT, Fergie

Is Fergie trying to give me high blood pressure? 

My friend Anil uploaded "Beat It 2008 With Fergie" to his Vox blog, and against my better judgment, I just listened.  And, as suspected, it's horrendous.

Don't listen to it.  Do read his post, but don't listen to the song.  You will regret it.

I'm all for celebrating the 25th anniversary of Thriller's release, which is the reason for this horrible remake, but the thing about a classic album is that it's classic for a reason.  It doesn't need to be messed with.  You certainly don't need to tack on some terrible "remixes" with today's hott stars (Akon, will.i.am, Fergie, Kanye) in order to get the kids to buy it, do you?  Maybe you do.  That's depressing.

And now I must go listen to the real, unmolested Thriller to cleanse my ears of this travesty.

Four Things

I'm kind of proud that an LJ-esque meme has brought Mena back to blogging.  And now it's my turn:

Four jobs I've had:

Assistant to the President, V2 Records, NYC
Artist Manager
Special Projects Manager, Texas Chapter of NARAS
My first job was painting t-shirts for a friend of my mom

Four movies I can watch over and over:

Reality Bites
Singles
Wet Hot American Summer
The Baxter

Four places I've lived:

San Antonio, TX
Austin, TX
New York City
San Francisco, CA

Four TV shows I love:

The Dog Whisperer
Project Runway
Made
Blow Out

Four places I've vacationed

Oh, this is so sad...
Austin, TX
NYC
Houston, TX
I spent 2 days in Omaha once.

2006 is the year of the vacation.

Four of my favorite dishes:

Anything involving no meat and:
coffee
cheese
dark chocolate
potatoes

Four sites I visit daily:

http://ljkrissy.livejournal.com/friends/
dictionary.com
SFist
Gmail

Four places I would rather be right now:

at home
at Club DeVille with friends in Austin
with my nephews in Houston
somewhere tropical

Tag Four Other Bloggers

Nyla
Ashod
Blagg who will probably not do it
Rows

La Lohan

Last May I called La Lohan out for being aggressively annoying based on her stick-like appearance on SNL.  Here's the photo I posted.

This is probably all over the internets by now, but I read on my new friend Aaron Parsley's LiveJournal that Lindsay's about to spill the beans about bulimia and drug use in a forthcoming Vanity Fair cover story. 

Read Aaron's preview of the story on Teen People online.  In it, he quotes:

Lohan became so thin that a Saturday Night Live producer held an intervention following the actress's appearance on the show. "I just started bawling. I knew I had a problem, and I couldn't admit it," Lohan says. "I saw that SNL after I did it. My arms were disgusting. I had no arms."

No kidding!  I'm glad she's finally acknowledging that this was not normal.

Merry Xmas

Nyla and I met up today to exchange presents and talk nonstop for a few hours, as we're wont to do.  Among the cool things she gave me was a Yoshitomo Nara 2006 calendar, which I love. 

She says she got it for me because there's one painting that reminds her of a baby picture of me.  I don't know, do you see a resemblance?

 

It's official:  bowl haircuts are the leading cause of grumpiness among toddlers.

Nostalgia

I miss my friends.  No one in San Francisco writes me poems -- I have to have them shipped in from outside the city limits.  I talked to Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Austin, Nashville and LA tonight.  Many cities I didn't talk to.  Everyone's too far.  Maybe the answer is simply plane tickets.

Laurie says her epitaph will state that her cause of death was nostalgia. 

A poem for you all:

"To A Friend" by Amy Lowell

I ask but one thing of you, only one,
That always you will be my dream of you;
That never shall I wake to find untrue
All this I have believed and rested on,
Forever vanished, like a vision gone
Out into the night.  Alas, how few
There are who strike in us a chord we knew
Existed, but so seldom heard its tone
We tremble at the half-forgotten sound.
The world is full of rude awakenings
And heaven-born castles shattered to the ground,
Yet still our human longing vainly clings
To a belief in beauty through all wrongs.
O stay your hand, and leave my heart its songs!

Best Surprise Gift EVAR.

I really need to not have two blogs.

Saturday's Chillin event was a big success, check out my LiveJournal for a camera phone photo of the ginormous crowd. Lots of people-watching and getting to hang out with Audree (her Dutchy booth was next to mine) plus getting paid cash for things I made. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday night.

Today I got perhaps the best surprise gift EVAR:

It's a tote bag made out of a copy of Heart's Little Queen on vinyl. This rules because I named my jewelry line after this record (and song), plus the fact that I want to be Nancy Wilson. No one could possibly appreciate this little tote bag more than me. Pet-sitting for Jet and Nemo is fun enough without getting an amazing present. Thanks Audree!