Rugged Flower

“Must be I find you
tough and lusty as the life, 
all toil and tempo,
finesse and plain fight,
with values so old they startle me.
Must be I think of you
as I do the rugged flowers
that prove themselves over and over in the spring,
that elsewhere might perish,
but here master the earth,
bloom into gangly lives of high color,
and inhale the sun, knowing the land
better than the land does.
Hardy, savvy,
they will outlive us all.” 
― Diane Ackerman

I'm Sexeh And I Know It

HRH Prince Buddy of New Orleans

So What?

French Quarter Street

“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That's one of my favorite things to say. So what.”  ~Andy Warhol

"Are the other folks' cows chewin' cud til the hour comes and their heads roll or are they just keepin' quiet like you, planning their escape?" ~ The Good Girl

Art by Marcia Baldwin

I watched The Good Girl last night & it scared me, thinking my life could have so easily been what hers was. Giving thanks to the universe..... and my own determination.
I recommend the movie, however, I can't decide if Jennifer Aniston's country southern accent is really good or really bad. One thing's for sure, it depicted small town life to a tee through the eyes of someone desperate to get out. Watch it and let me know what you think. (Yes, it's pretty much a chick flick.)

Silence

Audubon Park, New Orleans

“Silence is the language of Om. We need silence to be able to reach our Self. Both internal and external silence is very important to feel the presence of that supreme Love.” 
~Amit Ray

Different Eyes

Flashback Friday: Patti Smith

In honor of the great Patti Smith performing at JazzFest this year. Yaaaaaaaay!

Two Girls, Two Girls, Escape and Fantasy

I've been a bit on the sickly side the last couple of days (who hasn't?!) and have spent an unusual amount of hours lolling on the sofa in front of the TV. Whatever did sick people do for entertainment before TV? Friday's viewing was pretty much spent on HGTV (all those industrious people!) but I did get in a third viewing of The Kids Are All Rght.

 This 2010 movie stars Annette Benning and Julianne Moore as a married lesbian couple and Mark Ruffalo who was the donor for one of their children. The movie is about how the kids discover Mark is the dad of one of them and the ensuing struggle to form new relationships with him by the members of this (until now) peacefully co-existing family. This is the third time I've watched this movie and that's unusual for me because I don't usually watch a movie more than once, twice at the most. It's the kind of movie I like best which is looking into the lives of regular, normal (and sometimes not so normal) people who live really interesting, great lives without being "Look At Me, I Am Great" types of people. Ya know? Anyway, I recommend this movie if you haven't already seen it unless you're anti-gay marriage in which I case I strongly recommend it because it's obvious you don't have any gay or lesbian couples as friends and you need a little insight. (Hey! They're just like us!) Saturday I watched three movies back to back. I haven't done that in ages and let me say it reinforced my opinion that the pause button is the best invention ever for TV viewing. You can take bathroom breaks (many,many bathroom breaks) and make fridge raids (running out of Gatorade!) without missing a minute. Best. Thing. Ever.

 I'm getting a free preview of the Sundance channel right now and it's reminding me of how much I loved this channel when I had it. The first movie I watched was Ghost World which came out in 2001 and stars Thora Birch and Scarlett Johannsson. As the Sundance description says, "The lives of best friends (Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson) diverge after high-school graduation and their encounter with a pathetic loner (Steve Buscemi)."  These two girls do a little aimless wandering after high school graduation, sarcastically dissing to each other almost everyone they encounter and trying hard to be impassively cool while trying to convince themselves they hate cool people. Yeah, typical high schoolers. They meet the "pathetic loner" played by Steve Buscemi and one of the girls becomes fascinated by him, befriends him and it changes the nature of the attached-by-the-hip status of the two girls' relationship. I was a huge Steve Buscemi fan way before he hit it big on Boardwalk Empire and he is great in this movie as the "pathetic loner" without making it an expected parody of that character. This is a quirkey little movie, again of the genre that I like best; light and entertaining and a bit on the daffy side. I recommend it.

Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale and Steve Zahn was my next selection. This movie just blew me away. It's the true story of Deter Dengler, a U.S. fighter pilot played by Bale,  who was a prisoner of war in Laos during the Vietnam War and his harrowing escape from the camp. Probably half of the movie is about his life in the camp with five other prisoners, their daily life and how they planned the escape. The rest relates his and Gene Debruin's (played by Zahn) trek through the mountainous and vegetation-choked jungle during the escape to freedom. It's an awe-inspiring true tale that will keep you glued to the TV to the end. Great performances throughout, especially by Zahn, in my opinion. I only covered my eyes twice during the movie and it wasn't because of the relatively little violence, it was food related. I guess we'll do what we have to do to survive. I found this site, which I'm still reading and watching,while looking for more info about Dengler's story online and it takes issue with the telling of his story. So there's that. If you like true life stories or survival stories, you must watch this one.

 Finally, I watched Thor. Yep. I am not a fan of the fantasy genre but I kinda got sucked into this one simply by the gorgeous Chris Hemsworth. There were other people in the movie but, frankly, who cares? The story is about how Thor is cast from his home in Asgard, one of the nine realms of the universe, and lands on good old pedestrian Earth and how he saves them all from the wrath of his brother, Loki. It's pure fantasy escapism and I feel a bit sheepish that I watched and even, to a certain extent, enjoyed it. Look, I read the entire Tolkien series when I was younger and love them all but I've only seen bits of the first of the trilogy as a movie. That should tell you how little I like the fantasy genre. If you like fantasy you'll probably like this but what do I know? As a side note I'll say I also watched The Hunger Games a few days ago and, suprisingly, really liked it. Today is another day and a rainy one, at that. I'm feeling better but I suspect I'll still get in another movie before day's end. Have you seen any good ones lately?

 (Images via IMDb and Google Images.)
Originally posted on NOLAFemmes.com

French Quarter Balcony

"Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move."
~ Bob Dylan, Chronicles. Vol. 1

An Amalgamation of Lists

Finally! A use for that very cool word. ("amalgamation", not "lists")

For the last couple of weeks the same thoughts and images have been stuck in my head right before I go to sleep at night and right when I wake up in the morning. I feel scattered lately - all higgledly-piggledly. I can't settle down yet it's only on the inside. Outside I'm a slug. My body just kinda hunkers into the sofa  while my mind jumps around like a Mexican jumping bean. (Remember those? Are they still around?) But my mind jumps around the same thoughts and images so it's not exactly jumping, is it. More like obsessing. No. I don't like the word "obsess". It's a crazy-town word.
I. Am. Not. Obsessed.

2012 was probably the most emotionally wretched year of my life and I'm guessing with all the year-end looking back being talked about EVERYWHERE.....maybe my mind has picked up on that. It's like a tire stuck in mud, turning around and around but going nowhere.

I'm not a list-maker. Never have been. But at the beginning of 2012 I decided to keep a list of movies I watched and books I read so I could do a proper year-end wrap-up like people who are organized do.
Here's my book list:

Books Read 2012

April
Under the Tuscan Sun***

May
Wild by Cheryl Strayed *****

Here's my movie list:

2012 Movies

July

The Descendants - George Clooney ****
The Debt - Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson ****
The Ides of March - George Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman ***
The Girl With the Dragon Tatto (Swedish) - *****
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest *****

(Five stars is the best rating.)
(I put the actors names next to the movie titles to help me remember the movie. I have a horrible memory.)

As you can see, I didn't start listing in January. I just thought of it then and it took me a while to actually start. Of course I read more books and watched more movies than there are on my lists. I'm just not good about keeping up with lists. I forget about them.

Here's my 2012 To Do List:

2012 To Do List

Make Vegetable Lasagna - see Under the Tuscan Sun, page 223

I didn't do it.
I am pathetic.

Oh, I just found this unfinished post that I was writing about Cheryl Strayed's book on my Google Drive (where I keep my not-lists). I don't think I'll ever finish it but, hey, why not paste it here in this amalgamation? Here it is:

Book Review: Tiny Beautiful Things

First let me say that I am not a reviewer of things like books or movies. I don’t have an analytical mind and I freely admit it. I only know what I like and what speaks to me and from time to time I will share it . So I will write this review the way I would tell it to my friend, as if we were sitting in a coffee shop and just chatting.

A couple of months ago I read Wild by Cheryl Strayed and I intended to write about it but just never got around to it. Not because it wasn’t a meaningful book: it was. Very much so. It’s just because life got in the way. This book was the first book in longer than I can remember that I could not put down. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me say yes! Yes, I have felt that too! It was so wonderful that it made me want to read everything Cheryl had ever written and so I immediately read Tiny Beautiful Things next.

I have to come clean. I wrote a not very nice post about Cheryl before I read anything she had ever written other than her advice column, “Dear Sugar”, on “The Rumpus”. Truth be told, I only read maybe two or three of her columns there and made a snap decision that she was a poseur. I freely admit that I don’t like advice columnists. You can read my thoughts about that in the aforementioned post. (Mega mea culpa on that.) But the synopsis I read about Wild intrigued me and I have to say it was a work that grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go.

Tiny Beautiful Things grabbed my by the gut and wouldn’t let go.  I didn’t know when I picked the book up at my local library that it was a compilation of work from “Dear Sugar”. I’m glad I didn’t know because I might not have read it and that would have been my loss because Cheryl has one huge thing in her favor that other advice columnists don’t have or, at least, don’t exude: empathy. Cheryl doesn’t tell her advice-seekers what they should or must do to right their wrongs, she tells stories from her own experiences that correlate with the seekers’ situations and shares the lessons she has learned.

In this book ( and obviously in her column) she doesn’t talk to her seekers as if she’s on a perfection pedestal looking down on the rest of us poor pitiful sloggers but as a partner down in the mud with us, holding our hand as we both push through the muck and mire.
____________________

Maybe one day I'll finish it but that's it for now. I highly recommend both of Cheryl's books. Put them on your to-read list.

In May I started a monthly list of Big Things That Happened just so I wouldn't forget.  2012 began so well; January and February were pretty awesome. But the March through August lists are bad. Nothing good happened. Just reading them makes my stomach knot up. I have nothing down for September - I must have been recuperating. October's list has two good things and one bad written down but I know there was more. I just stopped at that point. 

One list that was successful (relatively speaking) was a list of lit zines I wanted to submit work to. Out of the eight zines I chose, five accepted me (three of them more than once) and three rejected me. I'm good with that. Those rejections will go back on my list for 2013.

I hope 2013 will be a better year. It doesn't have to be spectacular, just normal. I would love just normal. Wait. Make that "uneventful and quiet" instead of normal just in case all the past year's drama was trying to be my normal. 

Sometime in the middle of 2012 I came across a phrase that made a lot of sense to me and I spoke it to myself more times than I can count. It was, "Sometimes the best reaction is no reaction". It really worked for me in so many instances. 
I need a new phrase for 2013. I'm considering "All love, no fear" because the past year has made me fearful in ways I never thought of before and that's not me. (My husband has me firmly in the "risk-taker" column.)

So here's hoping 2012 is a fearless, uneventful and limited yet successful list-making year.

All Love, No Fear.