Katherine Dunham in “Le Jazz Hot”, originally presented in 1939.

Sweet Juniper posted this first and it pretty much made my day, so I’m reposting:

laser portraits

read this before clicking on the link

this is art, but art referencing vaginas is probably not suitable for work. So this is going behind a cut. I recommend checking it out when you are somewhere safe aka not at work. It’s pretty amazing.

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thanks, lady.

photo by renee

Two important anniversaries coming up next month.October 2nd marks my 7th year living in Pittsburgh. Seven years! The kneejerk comment to that is, of course: I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I moved here at the age of twenty. Oh, that means it’s been seven years since I owned a car. Sweet. I wonder if I’ll ever own a vehicle again. To be honest, I don’t think I want to.

I have a lot to say about being here seven years. I’m glad that I kept a livejournal for years and years, because I have a neat little pdf file of memories. Things I would have otherwise forgotten about. Wow. Seven years. All of my twenties in the 412. It’s kind of amazing. I’ll write more about this later. Like I said, I have a lot to say on the subject.

The other anniversary falls on October 10th. My last dose of Paxil.

this picture snapped right before taking my last dose

Again, I have so much to say about this. Not now, though. Soon. I’m thinking of something to do, some way to acknowledge the anniversary. Gotta find a way to celebrate survival.

Family of Spanish poet Lorca slain in Civil War won’t oppose opening of mass grave
By CIARAN GILES | Associated Press Writer
8:45 AM EDT, September 19, 2008

MADRID, Spain (AP) _ Federico Garcia Lorca’s family won’t oppose a petition to open a mass grave where his body is believed to have been dumped after Franco supporters allegedly executed the poet and playwright at the outbreak of Spain’s Civil War, a relative said Thursday.

A judge will decide whether to exhume the remains, but the announcement by the family of Spain’s most prominent and popular 20th century poet is a significant about-face after years of refusing to touch the grave.

It also takes Spain a bit closer to unraveling one of the 1936-39 war’s most intriguing mysteries — how the writer died and where exactly his remains are.

Garcia Lorca was 38 when he was killed. His work deals with universal themes such as love, death, passion, cruelty and injustice.

“We will accept whatever decision is taken without objection,” said Laura Garcia Lorca, the poet’s niece. But she insisted the family would prefer if the grave was left untouched.

A gorge in southern Spain believed to hold the poet’s and many other bodies “should be protected for the cemetery that it is, a testimony to the terrible crimes committed under Franco and the repression,” she told The Associated Press.

“To open just one of the graves there and distinguish some of the dead above the others demeans the virtue of the place as a historic legacy.”

Relatives of two other men believed to be buried in the same grave as the poet asked National Court judge Baltasar Garzon last week to order the grave opened — a move responding to the Lorca family’s steadfast refusal to let the grave be dug up.

It also formed part of a surging nationwide movement to give proper burial to the thousands of people known to have been killed by supporters of late dictator Gen. Francisco Franco and buried in mass graves.

“We understand the desire of a family to recover the remains of their relatives and give them proper burials,” said the niece. “For our family it is preferable that he (Lorca) stay there. He is in good company.”

Investigations indicate the poet, who was open about his homosexuality, was shot along with a school teacher named Dioscoro Galindo Gonzalez and two labor union activists — Francisco Galadi and Juan Arcolla — on Aug. 18, 1936, near the Viznar mountain gorge in Garcia Lorca’s native province of Granada.

The four bodies are believed to lie in a site close to an olive tree that has since been designated a memorial park. Others claim the burial spot is 400 yards away.

Several thousand others are believed to have been shot and dumped at the gorge.

The Franco rebellion triggered a civil war against the left-wing, democratically elected Republican government, and was followed by a 36-year dictatorship.

There is no official record of how many people died at the hands of Franco’s forces. British historian Paul Preston, an expert on the conflict, says 55,000 were killed by the Republican forces and were fully accounted for afterward.

Garzon recently asked church leaders, city mayors and other authorities for help in building a reliable list.

In many ways, the Lorca case symbolizes Spain’s attempts to deal with its painful past, with many, especially conservative groups, opposed to what they call opening up old wounds.

Last year, Spain’s Socialist government passed a watershed bill formally denouncing the Franco regime for the first time and made symbolic amends to victims of the war and the ensuing dictatorship.

The final decision regarding the grave rests with Garzon and this may take several months.

I haven’t been sleeping well. But that’s okay. As funny as it sounds, I know I’m in a good place when I can find more time to think(and honestly enjoy the extra time in my head..or maybe nowhere near my head but milling around in the heart, jitterbugging on the linoleum there).

Last night I had some gin/lemonade with my roommate and her friend on the porch, met a neighbor and watched a band roll in to crash for the night. The same band I heard playing from a second story window hours earlier in Lawrenceville. I was walking home from Tait’s house post-dinner and heard the beautiful noise of strings, bass, shouting singers. Nice to put faces with the moment. I went to bed and listened to my neighbor playing the saw in his backyard for a while. Sleep did not find me for some time, but the gin helped.

I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to say: I can sleep less, and be okay with it. Being tired is being something.

Maybe we are in a constant state of release. Maybe you wear through memories until they are the softest thinnest fabric and something tells you to stop because any more wear would mean tearing the sucker in two. Maybe making new ones becomes more important and then from there it isn’t a question of where your mind is—it is right here, it is processing what comes to it..pull from what you know. You learn to let go in the sweetest way. Maybe you finally become what you believe in. Maybe once that happens, you start to sleep less.

First, there is this:

These tourists from Oklahoma drink on Bourbon St. and say they are “playing it by ear,” regarding a possible evacuation as Gustav enters the Gulf of Mexico. Nagin said mandatory evacuations would begin if the storm becomes a Category 3 hurricane.

against this:

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered the city’s more than 239,000 residents to evacuate on Sunday in the face of powerful Hurricane Gustav, which he called “the mother of all storms.”

The evacuation order issued on Saturday was the first in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina devastated the historic Southern city in August 2005.

“This is the mother of all storms,” Nagin said of Gustav, a monstrous Category 4 storm that could approach the central Louisiana coast just west of New Orleans on Monday.

“You need to be concerned and you need to get your butts moving and out of New Orleans right now,” Nagin said at City Hall. “This is the storm of the century.”

The evacuation order, which will not be physically enforced by officials, will start with the city’s low-lying West Bank starting at 8 a.m. CDT (9 a.m. EDT) on Sunday, followed by the East Bank at noon CDT (1 p.m. EDT), Nagin told reporters.

Residents have the choice to remain behind and weather the storm, but “that would be one of the biggest mistakes that you could make in your life,” Nagin said.

He said people might have to chop through the roofs of their houses to escape rising waters if they stay.

“Make sure you have an ax,” he said.

But one day after the third anniversary of Katrina, many had already decided to abandon the city, much of which lies below sea level.

Thousands of people fled New Orleans earlier on Saturday. Hoping to avoid the 2005 spectacle of desperate city residents crammed into the New Orleans Superdome, the government lined up hundreds of buses and trains to evacuate 30,000 people who cannot leave on their own.

About 10,000 people left the city by bus or train on Saturday, Nagin said. The rest of the 20,000 people that had requested evacuation assistance would leave on Sunday, he added.

Many evacuees were issued wrist bands with bar codes that will allow city officials to track them.

Gustav crashed across the Cuban mainland on Saturday and could hit the U.S. Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm, the second-highest on the five-stage Saffir-Simpson scale, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

SIGNIFICANT FLOODING EXPECTED

In the Lower Ninth Ward, plunged under water by Katrina’s floodwaters, hundreds of residents packed belongings into cars and trucks and left. Some had returned home only a few months ago after fleeing Katrina.

“After Katrina, you’ve got to leave,” said Ruby Hall, a longtime resident, pointing to the place on the timber frame of the porch where Katrina’s waters rose. “I’m not going to chance it, not with my grandchild.”

The city’s West Bank was largely spared by Katrina but could see “significant flooding” because its 10-foot (3-metre) levees are no match for Gustav’s storm surge, which could top 20 feet, Nagin said.

Katrina’s massive storm surge broke through protective levees on August 29, 2005, and flooded 80 percent of the city. New Orleans degenerated into chaos as stranded storm victims waited days for rescue.

The hurricane killed about 1,500 people along the U.S. Gulf Coast and caused $80 billion in damages, making it the costliest U.S. natural disaster.

There was bumper-to-bumper traffic on highways leading out of the city on Saturday, and six low-lying parishes — the Louisiana equivalent of U.S. counties — issued evacuation orders.

All major Louisiana interstates will allow only one-way traffic away from the coast starting at 4 a.m. CDT (5 a.m. EDT) on Sunday. The last flight out of the New Orleans airport is scheduled to depart at 6 p.m. CDT (7 p.m.) on Sunday.

In all, 11.5 million people are in the path of Gustav, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Walter Parker, a security guard who was trapped for eight days in his apartment during the Katrina flooding, lined up outside the Union Passenger Terminal as families with bags packed and children in tow waited for transportation.

“I don’t want to see another Katrina, with dead bodies floating in the water,” Parker said.

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Greyhound screwed me and I didn’t get to head home for the weekend. Left with an uncomfortable amount of frustration, I decided to destroy something.

Now I have some wonderful scraps for art projects.
Now I have a room that looks like the afterbirth of an ice cream social for tornadoes.
Now I need a new dresser.

And now? I feel pretty damn good.