Life In The Aerie

By Mary Hannington

“Proving, once again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with me that can't be fixed by things going exactly the way I wish them too. “

– An Anonymous Friend

“The murder victims show evidence of being partially devoured by their murderers.”

– Night of the Living Dead TV Broadcast

Night of the Living Dead was essentially a film about planning. The antagonist and the protagonist were at odds about the right thing to do and the television news had an entirely different idea, which turned out to be everyone’s undoing.

You can try to weigh all the odds, but like Mick says “You can’t always get what you want.”

My Dad died in 2001. He was 84 years old and doing all right, then suddenly Ms. 91 was wheeling him around in the kitchen chairs. He had flare ups of gout so not much was thought of it, BUT when he stopped wanting to eat? I said, “Mom get him to the hospital now!”

I hauled my ass down to the Cumberland Mountains and a battle, like the ones I would have later with Ms. 91 and the hospital, ensued. He had AML (Acute Myeloid Leukemia) not a disease you want and it moves fucking fast.

He was a trailblazer and started a hiking club, a decorated army Major in the famous “Deadeyes”, his golf group was known as “The Idiots” because they would go out in all weather and he was head of the community board, not a guy you expected to go down like this.

But I knew he would die.

I wanted to do everything for his comfort. I wanted to at least get him to a point where he could have hospice care instead of dying in the hospital, but it was too late. I fed him my cancer diet and he stayed pretty strong. His white count went up a bit, but it was SO low still, everything was shutting down and we couldn't get him home again.

He had a Living Will that specifically said NO heroic measures to preserve his life. So I pulled everything… it was one of the hardest things I had to do. I waited a bit with the feeding tube to give Ms, 91 some time, but it was only a few days and I had it pulled too. I asked his neurologist, the only doctor I trusted, what I could expect. Total organ shut down and not a pleasant experience, but I wanted to know everything.

I was sure there wouldn’t be much time.

The head nurse made sure we had morphine. His arrogant young doctor hadn’t bothered to think of it and never came to see me. Once someone is going to die doctors move on sometimes and it was a lesson learned for me.

Where there is no hope, there should still be care.

All those plans were made on the fly and one led to another and trusted advisors led me along the way. Sticking to a plan is not how to live your life. Sometimes it’s a gentle stream and you can just paddle along, but rest assured there are rapids ahead or a fallen tree that blocks your way.

I held my Dad’s hand for hours and I told him everything I wanted to say. And despite the fact he didn’t want to be kept alive he fought death. And I finally said, “Dad it is okay let go, just let go, I promise I will take care of Mom.” He died, moments later.

This all happened when my business was in turmoil, needed a new model and I needed to be back in Detroit, but life doesn’t work out like you planned.

Ms. 91 broke her other hip months later making the score two. The business situation in Detroit (Automotives and Advertising) were going to blow and I knew that I had to PLAN for that and the care of my remaining parent too. And I did. Then for seven years, while she broke bones, had concussions, strokes, sold the house, bought a condo and refused to move up here with me... I waited.

I had a home business, I was ready for the inevitable, BUT it took seven years instead of the time frame I had PLANNED on.

The inevitably finally came, only by then the clients I was working with from home (mostly entrepreneurs) were all dropping like flies. Yay! A recession! I had a Ms. 91 ensconced in my dining room, where I used to be set up and my work was dwindling.

Then the film incentives hit. Back to my old haunts of film, music videos, cable and TV shows. Ms. 91 was now on her feet and working out at the YMCA, but she still needed care and I was gone for 14 to 16 hours a day. The whole idea of working from home had failed.

NEW PLAN.

Then the film incentives were essentially killed.

I threw my hands up in the air and said, “NEW PLAN?”

I took time off and cashed out funds and started to write a book about the last three years of my life with Ms. 91. And then a friend of mine dropped into my life. He has congestive heart failure, arthritis and has just had a stroke.

From playing guitar on stage to unable to walk.

It is Ms. 91’s story exactly and I knew just what to do.

I had to care for him and in a way I AM writing the story of my life. Or life is writing it for me. Without plans.

Funny how that works…

When you stop making plans life somehow takes you where you should go. It may be painful, it may be hard, but if you are making a difference… well, ain’t that what life should be about.

Ms. 91 had her third birthday party today and got shit-faced on Sangria. I practically had to carry her from wheelchair to car. I was late to see my friend in the nursing home, but I FINALLY met his beautiful daughter and we got through all the paperwork, bureaucracy, legal PLANS and all those things I now know how to deal with.

Because I have a Ms. 91 in my life…

I helped him exercise today and I asked what he needed, my experience taught me what was important, he was depressed (wouldn’t you be?) and now he is motivated, cheerful and we are planning a wheelchair race on Sunday. It came naturally and unplanned. I kicked some ass and he did too.

Today we made it past the zombies and the truck didn’t blow up.

Life don’t get better than that.

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“To be or not to be that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or …”

– Hamlet

“Be honest with others, but be brutally honest with yourself. That way, when others tell you who you are you will know the truth. And flattery and criticism will be tempered by self-knowledge.”

– My reflection on those kicking my ass (often Ms. 91) and those loving me up (sometimes Ms. 91 too), but thankfully some other kind folks.

Ms. 91 and I just had our weekly discussion entitled “Why do I have to live this long. It’s ridiculous!”

After my father died, over ten years ago now, she kicked my brother and I out of the house saying, “Get out of here!” and then “I have to figure out how to live by myself.” I had been there for months as a patient advocate for dad and later to deal with his death and my brother was down for a small private viewing.





For a while Ms. 91 did pretty good, but my visits to the Cumberland Mountains increased in frequency and duration. I took over her taxes and the mulching and trimming in the garden.

I remember a day spent fixing a botched stain job on the lower deck.

She decided to downsize and the move was an ill-managed disaster on her part, though I tried my best to help, even doing blueprints and interior design layouts for her choice of condos, though the house I found her was cheaper and one level… her friends all said “CONDO” and Ms. 91 can be stubborn.

Anyhoo, the other day she asked, “How long have I lived here?” and I said “Three years.” And that sent off a cascade of “I never wanted to be such a burden”… and so on, but the truth is she IS a demanding sort.

“Are you going to take me to the “Y” or not?”

“I want to take Tom out to lunch. Get me some cash will you.”

“Will you ship this to Aunt L?”

“Do you got some coffee?” (This makes her sick unless I dilute it with water and renuke it in the microwave) She insists it doesn’t make her sick, but she doesn’t know I dilute the piss out of it.

“Someone called and I don’t know how to work the phone, can you find out who?”

“DON’T GIVE ME A WHOLE LATEX! MY FEET AREN’T SWOLLEN!” She means Lasix, which keeps a congestive heart failure patient’s fluid regulated so that one does not get fluid in the lungs and surrounding the heart and DIE of heart failure.

“The doctor”, she says “Said it affects my kidneys.” The doctor that she hates and doesn’t trust and yesterday she told the doctor and I she wanted to die, so why is she worried about kidneys?

I mean those two stick their tongues out at each other!

I know, I know, she is worried about running out of Depends or wetting the bed. BUT the alternative is suffocating and having a heart attack. AND we just checked her kidney levels… oh help me Zeus!

“Will you buy some Clorox wipes?” The plastic raised toilet seat gets stained and this is a task she has taken on, tasks are good, so she has been searching for the “perfect” cleaning materials. I dump Ajax cleanser on the toilet brush, scrub until clean and rinse. She spends an hour with a rag and cleanser.

I try to find things to make her feel useful. She folds her own clothes (badly) and then I refold and organize them for her. When she is not looking of course!

We have hour-long discussions on politics, science, her family, the books we have read, but today it was euthanasia and a Time article on the states that allow it. Okay 91, if you are racked in pain and suffering horribly from a brain tumor we will move to Oregon!

The funny thing is when my dad retired he retired. Mom would run around cleaning house while my dad read Time or a book in his easy chair. If something needed fixing he hired someone and he dried the dishes after dinner, but mostly he blazed trails, hiked, golfed and planned vacations.

I don’t EVER remember Ms. 91 and he discussing politics - she voted for whomever he did - or science or even nature, which they both loved. Now she comes wheeling out to say, “Santorum doesn’t want to be a president he wants to be MINISTER of the United States!”

Without the ability to clean house or cook she is suddenly playing Dad’s role while I try to be provider AND housewife.

And the truth is I agree with her about euthanasia. If you’re suffering from an incurable disease, why should that suffering be prolonged? She is only suffering because she can’t do everything she used to do. She is fed healthy meals, has good doctors that advise me, a daughter that researches her conditions, drives her to the “Y” for exercise, to luncheons and dinners. I do her laundry, sometimes the sheets more frequently.

She obsesses on subjects…

Ms. 91 spent a week obsessed with Cameron's dive... when is it going to be on TV? Has he started yet? What do you think he'll find?

I say, "You know my friend Bert had ocean species named after him."

"He DOES?"

I love her amazement at things.

"I swept and washed half the floor today." Another obsession that I constantly clean and finish fixing my house up, but it is not my priority at the moment and I only do it for her.

“You DID?”

I give her flowers from my garden all season long...

She gives me joy and she tries my patience, she is my closest companion, my biggest critic, my best cheerleader, and mostly, she loves on me like no one else.

She says, “Aren’t you angry at this Florida law? My sister says 21 States have it.” And she goes on, “Anyone could walk up to me on the street, shoot me and say I attacked them and it was ‘self defense’!” Unlikely given she is 94 and uses a wheelchair or walker, but sometimes I think… you know she can get pretty pissed off.

And she is pissed off about this law.

I explain the 2nd amendment, the right to bear arms, powerful gun lobbies and what various groups believe. And she says, “So what! How can a 200lb. man claim self defense when he has a gun and this kid only has a bag of Skittles?” I know mom it is a stupid law. “They should get rid of it! What are people thinking!”

If my life were simpler? I think I’d take 91 and follow the caucuses and primaries so that she could get us the primo seats in her wheelchair and then heckle the shit out of the candidates. Now that would be a novel!

Instead of Steinbeck’s “My Travels with Charlie” we’d have “My Primaries with Ms. 91”

Posted by M. Hannington at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By The Cupid Stunt

Everyone in my life lately seems to be saying, "Did you do this? Did you do that?"

I say, “Yeah, yeah and what did you do?”

Nada.

Right.

Doc Mizrahi just wants to know what is up with Faye Dunaway. He knows that I have done, did, do what I was supposta.

Well, to the best of my ability anyway.

Ms. 91 likes to read so when we are in the doctor’s office she reads the signs.

In the lab she asks the technician, “What do you do?” The word “phlebotomist” on the sign is an unfamiliar one to Ms. 91. Shit, what happened yesterday is unfamiliar to Ms. 91. The phlebotomist (not a woman who is at a loss for words) is not quite sure how to frame the answer to a 94 year old.

I say, “She is a vampire.”

“She drains your blood.”

When we are finished Ms. 91 says of her blood, “Do I have any left?”

They only take as much as they need mom. They want you alive and the doctor has a mortgage ya know.

Ms. 91 needs an RX refill. Doc says to his medical student, “These are the mystery women… Mary calls in her Mom’s RX for Lasix again and again and I refill it… I’m not a complete asshole!”

He forgives my tardiness and at some point he needs to check her blood levels and I know all that, but she’s obstinate. What am I supposed to do bang her over the head with a frying pan and drag her in?

“Shit Doc! You know what she is like?”

Last time I called him on the cell we were months late for our appointments and his first words were “You’re still alive!”

Mary did you send that check? Mary can you fix the TV headphones? Mary did you solve Mom’s IRS deal?

Yeah, yeah, what? Was I waiting for you or you to offer to do it?

Oh, and believe it or not I once lived the high life.

I tell 91 about it.

Vendors gave me gift baskets… with good shit in them too, not stupid refridgerator magnets.

Why do I always forget there is no “D” in refrigerator?

Why is the slang for refrigerator “fridge”?

If a refrigerator makes things frigid (as in cold) why is the “D” missing?

A friend once gave me a small jar of white truffles. I have had truffle shavings on a dish at the Detroit Athletic Club and on venison at the Gulf Coast Restaurant , famous for its wild game, in NYC along with Champagne Kir or Kir Royale with a friend that had a tony apartment in Chelsea worth a mill.

Yeah, yeah, in a low-cut black velvet number and high heels.

These days I don’t even have the time or coin for the local morels (which I love more than truffles) at the Rattlesnake Club in Detroit, famous for fresh morel dishes and its creative use of other seasonal foods.

Maybe if hold a cardboard sign - I just want one morel... will dance for it.

Didn’t know I was once such a lucky girl. French or Italian truffles these days can cost you from $100- $300 bucks a dish and dealers are cutting them with the less desirable Chinese truffle to up profits like coke dealers use mannitol.

BUT, who needs fungus anyway!

AND, are they really people who sit around trying to figure out truffle trafficking? I can't imagine.

Oh, but just one sauteed morel would be really nice!

Next stop today the dentist. Everyone fawns over her. Of Ms. 91, Dr. Abbatte says, “She is so cute!” Yeah pal, that’s my Vera Wang hat she’s wearing!

Maybe she is my man magnet? The hottie lifeguards at the YMCA love her, waiters swoon over getting her seated, Doc sticks his tongue out at her, but he really, REALLY loves her. My boys on the lighting crew would walk my golden retriever, and my only real love, because he was a TOTAL babe magnet.

Can a 94 year old in a wheel chair be a stud magnet? Hmmmm…

And Shorty (my foster dog), well, he’s hardly a man magnet, but god dammit… here come the tears. He most likely will leave me next week for a forever home and he keeps nuzzling me and licking my chin as if to say “No, I want to stay!”

You know me… I have to keep room for the other strays.

Happy New Years everyone!

I’m tart, bitchy, and sarcastic, but deep down I have a love and fascination for mankind. For those of you, especially lately, that have cheered me on and been entertained by my splurting (yeah I know, spurting is probably more grammatically correct, but fuck it) of verbiage. I thank you and I love you for it.

If it weren’t for many of you I wouldn’t have stories to tell.

May all YOUR stories be fairy tales.

Posted by M. Hannington at 05:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By The Cupid Stunt

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

– Carl Sagan

There is NO way Mary was a virgin… virgin birth? I just can’t believe that!

– Ms. 91

When I was a teen I read Carl Sagan’s “The Dragons of Eden”. At the time I would have probably referred to myself as an agnostic and the book seemed to confirm this fact, after all, Sagan’s subtitle is “Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence” and like the agnostic he is only “speculating” and not confessing to KNOW. Currently I’m reading Stephen Baxter’s “Evolution” Guru’s favorite book. I never thought that books or one's thoughts could create such profound connections, but they would. These days I lean more towards atheism, how can I not with that little hussy Ms. 91 running around debunking biblical myths to everyone she meets. She vividly remembers her childhood priest, Father Splinter, how handsome he was and the feeling of awe she felt at church, but we all go through transitions in our lives and we should.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

- Francis Bacon

Sagan, brilliantly, discussed the intelligence of the information in the bible (again we assume these folks were speculating too). He found that the bible and its writers might have had some things right in regards to evolution. He sites what God says will happen to Eve if she eats of the tree of knowledge. "In pain shalt thou bring forth children" (Genesis 3:16) and in human evolution the brain developed much faster than the female body did to handle the expansion. The fontanelle or the incomplete infant’s skull evolved, according to early theories, to accommodate this.

Of course the writers of the bible and many religious folks, even today, would say that God knew that eating from the tree of knowledge would enlarge babies' brains. The whole thing seems rather metaphorical to me and man's way of explaining why animals give birth rather easily and women do not, but that is just me.

What hit home with me the most, however, was how Sagan compared creation (Genesis) with evolution. I thought it was pure genius. And Baxter in his wisdom takes it beyond the bible's description of creation and into the future, but he confirms Sagan’s writing in a most wonderful painting of these evolutionary events… hundreds of millions of years ago.

Let there be light.

- Genesis 1:3

To Sagan the first day would represent the Jurassic period and that night? The time the comet hits the Yucatan Peninsula and renders the Earth dark and the dinosaurs extinct. The second day came “seas” from a frozen comet-bombed planet into the start of the boggy end to the Cretaceous. Then dry ground, then plants, then fish, then birds, then land animals, then man, woman and alas some rest. In Sagan’s astute brain the seven days of Genesis represented the two hundred million years of evolution. In Baxter’s equally excellent mind it is the fishes, sea turtles too, and the birds and small plentiful mammals that begin to thrive after the comet wipes away the dinosaurs… he writes as if the first set of creatures never had a chance to evolve, but perhaps the next set was a better path to man.

May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times? It is quite conformable with what we know of the transmission of formerly well-developed characters, that they should appear at an early period of life, and afterwards disappear-like gill slits in human embryology.

– Charles Darwin

Even a fetus goes through an evolution of sorts.

Have you ever experienced the feeling of falling in your dreams and woken up suddenly?

I have.

Like the apes we once descended from or Purga, a small mammal, from Baxter's novel that took refuge in the trees.

Fall and refuge is lost. So we wake ourselves up in our nests to make sure we are still safe from harm... the predators lurking below us still at bay.

The Dragons of Eden amazed me… Darwin amazed me. At the time, mom was organic gardening, we watched PBS, did Yoga, dug Julia Child AND Carl Sagan. My brother was sneaking joints, I was smoking menthols and probably had had my first acid trip, was shaking my booty at discos and certainly was no longer a virgin. The farm, Father Splinter and atheism were not on Ms. 91’s mind then and she could still remember what she did two days ago. It was an amazing time and somewhere in Manhattan was a boy that was digging the same shit – yeah maybe digging hot pants more than Julia Child - that same boy, just like I, was raised up in a southern religion and yet began to question everything.

Things would change for us both in the eighties. Guru would watch as his peers cast their votes for a movie actor with an agenda and I would butt heads with my father, who found my decisions, to study art not advertising, to study communism AND risk getting the family on the black list!, to live with a man without marriage. Suddenly I was supposed to think a certain way, have morals I hadn't been taught since I was five in bible school.

BUT this story begins after my own rebellion, the heartbreak and struggle of the Reagan years, when a sudden loss of the seeking of enlightenment seemed to sweep the whole country and my rise to success under the Clinton years when we all began learning again. This story begins after I had closed a successful special effects studio, born of a fascination of all the new technology, a studio that had weathered one recession and then I saw the other one coming. I was sick of the greed and lack of ideas in the advertising world that provided my fodder and instead found work on job boards and with direct clients (entrepreneurs). I had begun to play fantasy football, which landed me some good cash and I had a fairly lucrative Ebay business.

And I started writing… And so did Guru wander the same sort of path.

I wrote on a sports site called The Sporting News. I was the wild girl amongst mostly conservative Christian sportswriters. My fantasy league, a brusque group of stockbrockers, even kicked me out for smack talk! When I wrote I hacked code, added animation to my page, then video and along the way I was learning to write again, but for a girl who was into Carl Sagan, the Tao de Ching?

It was a transition.

I had come to believe by this time that there was a force in this world. One I could tap into with meditation and yoga. It was similar to the Christian thought “Let go, let God”, but it was more a feeling that the carbon atoms that made us all up were connected, that somehow if you let things flow (let go) you would move with them in the ways you were meant to.

Hardly fare for the working man that was looking for stats on his teams, but I made it copacetic... combining sports with life in my scribblings.

Today Ms. 91 and I laugh at the crazy creationist ideas that dinosaurs and man lived together, but back then I was working on a way to create a home for her, my Dad had died suddenly, she had broken every bone in her body and I didn’t think it would be long before she needed to leave the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee and move in with me. She wasn’t religious, but she had yet to be exposed to her daughter’s ideas so intimately. She wasn't yet a Tiger's fan or someone that thought Derek Jeter was hot. She needed my help to survive the every day stuff.

Her bills, her garden, downsizing…

It was around then I found Guru. A man now (at least partly), who had returned like I had in my adventures to a home, his in the mountains and caverns of Manhattan, which had long been a home away from home for me. Here he was, on the same sports site, spouting off about religious fantasy and science. I sent a comment to him one day that I once had hoped that Carl Sagan’s “Dragons of Eden” would be a bridge for those two worlds and I forget how he answered, but it was something along the lines of “Any woman that groks Sagan has me intrigued!”

We flirted, we were both living with old lovers (platonically) at the time, and we wrote long emails. He once said “Hmmm a girl from the south named Mary, the same name as my mom.” He WAS intrigued and so was I, but I had Ms. 91 and Slouchy and he had NH Girl and Cowboy Mama, who was a southern girl fo’ sure, but it would be years before I met her.

When I did, and NH Girl too, I instantly loved them both, so beautifully, like Stephen Baxter's words did he paint them. And in those brief moments I spent with them they loved on me too.

Ms. 91? Guru, if he had ever met her, would adore her. Instead, he sent his herald and all of us had an adventure. Ms. 91 and I, Speedy, Guru and those we picked up along the way.

At the time, I was always working and I still am, my companions were employees of fifteen years or more, they still are mostly. I didn’t realize I had no life.

Meeting a kindred spirit was a thrill – he was also a load – a charming, sometimes sad load. Without him this endless battering of keys would have stopped long ago. He told me I had a voice too and I believed him.

He had multiple personalities barely controlled by a charming semi-merged force I called Matthew. The rest of Guru was a flirty bisexual, an overly aggressive and controlling manly man or he was the loud mouth kid that could be both petulant or heartbreakingly full of the pain only a child feels – the kind adults learn to cope with, but I didn’t know any of that yet.

Nor did I know about the oral fixation until in a moment of stress I watched him almost engulf – like Galactus (Google it) consumes worlds - a pizza meant for four.

He took his time revealing himself and agonized over finally uncovering it all. And by the time he did Ms. 91 was firmly ensconced, Galactus’ herald had been sent and our venture had already begun.

Posted by M. Hannington at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

Always agree with them and LIE if you have to.

– Dr. Ron

The YMCA at Night.

My neighbor, Dr. Ron, is a gerontologist who takes care of seniors so he should know. And though the first part is the best advice EVER, in many ways it goes hand and hand with the second part of his counsel.

When I forget this advice I am always sorry for it.

Ms. 91 says, “I hope you finish this book before I die!”

Given that she has high blood pressure, poor thyroid function, congestive heart failure, arthritis, has broken every bone in her body, has P.A.D. (Oh, just Google it!), she’s pushing 95 now, has dementia that has become increasingly worse AND her daughter is a procrastinator - the odds ain’t exactly good.

She says, “I have never read anything you’ve written!”

I, stupidly, disagreed (she has read tons of my stuff) and then I spent part of the day “cleaning” up a story for her that I had written. AND dammit I left the word “shit” in. Get used to it!

However, her daughter, that’s me, is also known to be a whirlwind and can make the impossible happen as well. So, we have that going on and 91 is the same freakin’ way. We kept this April’s birthday quiet, thinking that 95 should be the big shebang, but during the year and one by one the staff at the “Y” became aware she was now 94 years old.

Me just before my "15 minute while Ms. 91 is changing clothes in the stall behind me workout."

Our “little” block long YMCA.

News spreads and gossip abounds in what has become a tight knit community that is the Boll Family YMCA. You see the same employees, runners, b-ball players, class goers, darling children in day care programs and instructors around every time you go and we go three times a week.

The children wave and call her "Grandma", the wheelchair doesn't spook them like the adults that don't quite know how to deal with it. She CAN walk after all, but not everyone knows it.

They’re hip to the fact that she is special and she digs it big time. AND thank Buddha ‘cause her daughter is tired and boosting an ego like Ms. 91’s when she is depressed? A mountain… as opposed to a molehill, yuh dig?

They other day she started crying in the car. “I never wanted to live this long...” she said. I hear it often. Without the “Y”, my cousin Tom and my bro, the doctor, who she claims to despise, but really enjoys the sword fights with and the attention he and his staff provide her… she would be even more depressed.

The Y, a block away from my old studio on Grand.

BUT of course this just makes me depressed.

I sleep on a couch just outside of where she stays in my old dining room, I wake at her every movement and listen to make sure she doesn’t fall. She is the baby I never had and the mother I rebelled from long ago.

That’s some painful shit ("Mom I said shit!"), right there.

She read my story and said, “It’s different… I don’t think I understand it.”

Truth is, she won’t ever read the book and won’t ever really UNDERSTAND her daughter; we come from different times and different paths. She has grokked some of my life, but she will never understand it fully in the way that the author Robert Heinlein meant the word to mean.

A deep understanding… that is a rare thing and I have only really grokked two people EVER in my life. They were best friends and they both moved on.

Sure there were little grok moments, but not like these… not ever like these.

Ms. 91 will move on too. It’s inevitable.

She has the nicest ass of any 94 year old I have ever known.

We are groking right? Everyone has an ass... get OVER it. Dozens and dozens of people have seen it by now and I've seen it too many times to count.

Love handles sag lower, butt cheeks too, but to me it is all beautiful.

People grok, but people also tell little white lies, they exaggerate, they miss things in language and things that go on behind the scenes.

They sometimes miss REAL beauty and find only what was taught them instead.

The two of us talked about death AGAIN, but with brutal honestly. A chance to grok.

Maybe letting her read my written piece on the carnage of deer and the carnage of our lives wasn’t the best pick, but it was the handiest one.

Ms. 91 says she remembers the nurse nodding that it was time to pull the IV. Only it was the feeding tube she was thinking of that was keeping my Dad alive. I had left it in for a few more days because I saw my Mother was in denial and since I had power of attorney and I was my father’s patient advocate, she really had no say in the matter.

It was a nurse, and a really terrific one, that helped me ease my dad into death and my Mom back to reality.

Ms. 91’s sister has a big heart and meaning well, in a discussion on living wills, she said to her sister that she had to specify “No open heart surgery.” in her living will.

She sends the greatest care packages, full of candy, trail mix, fancy breads, magazines and quite often treats that aren’t exactly heart healthy, which are “extracted”.

There is a picture for this too, but we have gone far enough and it waits another time.

Well, no doctor in their right mind is going to perform open heart on a 94 year old woman and I had to explain to her that her living will says “No heroic procedures.” This would easily fall under that category and I’ve already had to refuse intubation (A far less invasive procedure than open heart surgery!) when the hospital a few years ago thought they might lose her.

“No, no I wouldn’t have wanted that.” she says.

What she doesn't remember is me listening to her say "Mary, please just let me die." over and over in the emergency room and she'll never know what it is like to be the one. The one that will have to say, "Let her go."

It is the same deal I had with Dad and I assure her over and over that the doctor and I are only concerned with her comfort and I KNOW her wishes through and through and it doesn’t make it easy, but it IS the one thing I grok.

I wish I had those two friends, but one can’t be brought back to life and the other has chosen a happier path than one such as me.

Saying goodbye to her won't be easy and saying bye to him, my last "grokee" was not a piece of cake.

I feel grok-less and without hope on many days, but blurting out this stuff, well, it makes a difference. If you listen, thank you, if you don’t, don’t make no never mind.

Peace.

I'll save the last chapter of this tale for the man that reminded me to grok, but don't hold your breath. It is a long one and belongs only if attached to a published book.

Posted by M. Hannington at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OMG I have never seen so much blood, so many parts of deer or dead bodies of deer littered everywhere.

– My thoughts on my morning drive out of nowhere.

We were both living very different lives than we expected.

I imagined a loft somewhere in the city that I could peddle my art and restored antiques, complete with someone to watch over me - to smile at my face like I smiled at his - not this big old house full of human and animal strays that all needed watching. I once had the loft (larger than the house) AND the house too.

It all proved too much for me.

Too much space… too much stuff…

He was an apartment dwelling city boy when we met, a social animal (BOTH of us party animals) and now he lives in a mansion in the middle of nowhere complete with elevator, heated lap pool, a suite for me with a bathroom and my own fuckin’ bar (with a toaster too!)… the lake view to die for.

Quiet…

So quiet, every noise began to startle me.

“What was that, are those bullfrogs?” I say. “No” he says, “Those are cows.”

I’ve stayed in my world for too long and it’s time for a change. He’s in a world he never imagined.

Adjustments are being made…

We met in the late 80’s, just a couple of freaks that appreciated each other’s freakiness.

On the phone he says, “Watch out for the deer.”

Days of my youth camping in the wilderness with friends that ended in midnight drives home through dark forests, scanning ever left and then right… all this passes through my mind in a flash. Those drives were sometimes harrowing. You’d see them, the deer, on the outskirts of the woods, eyes glowing and you'd think...

“One leap from them and I’m a goner.”

One little leap the wrong way and your life is gone.

Here it is, evening, dark as Russian caviar and I think, “I’m in the middle of fucking nowhere.” Past my old stomping grounds at Michigan State, past my old roommate’s small hamlet of Owosso (Part Cherokee, it figures she’d hail from a town with an Indian name!).

It’s rutting season and antsy doe deer are trying to escape horny bucks in the blackness all around me.

What the fuck am I doing?

I’m on a highway I’ve never heard of and my GPS says I’m here, where exactly is here?

I didn’t see a street, but there was a lone white house amidst cornfields so I pulled into the drive. Luckily, I had phone service because ten feet behind me there wasn’t ANY. I text him to say, “GPS says I’m here, but I don’t know where I am.” I tell him I’m at a white house and he texts, “Bop.” Then, “Honk your horn.”

At this point I figure he is off in his van to try to find me, then he texts, “Look for the blinking lights.”

I’m scanning the road for flashing headlights and suddenly I see in my rearview mirror that an ENTIRE house is blinking. I think briefly, “Okay, this is a new one.”

The street is only twenty feet away and the drive is so close to what is really a tiny dirt road that I had mistaken it all for a driveway. Holy shit! Never thought you could make a house blink!

This house is new and it can do all sorts of things.

And despite the fact that I’m familiar with houses with elevators (plenty in “The Village” where I live) on my visit I twice bumped my toes on the railing which surrounds a two story planned fountain as I headed to the stairs.

I could have avoided it all by taking the elevator, but I’m used to stairs.

The next day we took a drive to the nearest town – a few blocks large. There are lots of white people. Many of them are wearing camouflage and at the only two restaurants I see (owned by the same folks, one a pizzeria, one a diner and connected), where we eat a late breakfast he says, “Mary, NO swearing they might throw you out!”

I survey my surroundings and become uneasy. These are farmers mostly and according to my friend many of them millionaires (he has already pointed out a farm with a landing strip and a private plane and described others that have helipads).

This momentarily terrified me, though I have nothing against farmers, it was an unknown, an unimagined thing, I have to wrap my head around it all.

I have to wrap my head around my whole life.

The two of us giggled because the cashier is not only wearing a camouflage shirt, albeit somewhat more sophisticated than a t-shirt or the typical cargo pants, but weirder still her hair has been dyed green, yellow and brown to match.

Before I left, I asked him if he was happy. He knows my journey, my deal and I know his, like everyone that loves me he wants it to happen and knows it is complicated, that we CARE that we both find happiness?

That’s the bomb.

We have both left our share of carcasses behind (lives lived that we thought worked, but didn’t) and we are doing the best we can to care for love the ones we are with and we understand that dreams really don't exist.

They decay on the side of the road.

Posted by M. Hannington at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

He looked a lot like Che Guevara, drove a diesel van
Kept his gun in quiet seclusion,
such a humble man
The only survivor of the National People's Gang
Panic in Detroit, I asked for an autograph
He wanted to stay home, I wish someone would phone
Panic in Detroit

Smiley (Mom), G-Twin, Tab Hunter, Guru Peeper, Gray One and the hugest 30 lb. tomcat you have ever seen show up. Ferals…

Intense stealth and detective work ensue to get them inside or trapped.

Tab Hunter, who lives in the closet and only comes out to eat and poop, escapes by running up the front stairs and down the back stairs (it’s an old house okay!) and then out the back door (open) right past me (sitting on the porch stairs) like a fucking missile.

Kittens are FAST!

He (probably a she) IS coming back in the house to eat and the threshold allowed is now 3 feet, the door that closes off the stairway upstairs remains closed baring further escape… Muaah! BUT the run around to the front of the house to shut the door on him trick ain’t working… fool me once.

Little Guru was caught when I instinctually grabbed her in a storm just after my neighbor’s tree fell into my yard. She has a home as does Gray One. Can't stand to lose Gray One (tomorrow) trade him for Jen-Jen Guru? Then I can still visit? Don't like to interfere with the adoptions. BUT such tears.

A week later a huge branch was ripped from my tree. Luckily, I was not ten feet away this time nor were any kittens and it was the night before our scheduled yard debris pick up. More mulch for the city parks and boulevards… Yay!

The IRS just told me my 94 year old mother owes them THOUSANDS. Lawyer!

I’m so behind with the old mail that the new mail is piling up.

The Jazz Festival is in full swing with people from all over the world crowded around Hart Plaza in Detroit and is hit at 8:00PM with immense winds, BUT some cool cats arrange to take the concert inside and are up again at 10:30PM and into the night, safe in a Ren Cen ballroom. Meanwhile, Tigers are losing badly and in a rain delay and a huge beer tent collapses in the wind and trees fall around the crowds at the nearby Rouge Festival.

AND some moron knocks on my door looking for a partay!

BUT the Tigers turn an 8-2 loss into a 9-8 win in the ninth after the third nasty storm to hit the city passes.

Last night someone cut the lock from my back gate and entered the yard. I have been unloading and loading a garage full of my assets for the film company… I imagine they have seen this and are after the loot. It would be a difficult task to make away with much, but we have a friendly, DESPERATE neighborhood crack addict hanging around.

The garage is secure with a dead bolt and I will board the damn windows if I have to. And luckily, at 2:30AM, the neighbor’s dogs made a beeline for the back fence and no doubt scared the guy away.

I still survive in this war zone… always seem to.

On a cool, slightly breezy Labor Day Barack Obama talked to my union brothers and sisters here in Detroit amongst huge crowds. Trying to fill us with hope for the future.

And later, the Tigers kick some major ass on Cleveland and a pitcher nicknamed Twisted Fister is born.

Just now Ms. 91 cleaned the toilet and can’t find the white cap that covers the screw, a disaster! Then gives me the Depends count for the day.

Ah happiness. A plastic cap can be found or bought as can Depends, but Twisted Fister? That makes me laugh.

Editor's note: Sorry for the quality of some of the pictures, during the work on the most recent film I managed to lose both battery chargers for my Canon and have had to resort to documenting my life, ah storey (shit I mean story of my life!) with my iPhone.

And yes my toilet seat has a dog theme.

Posted by M. Hannington at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

I was once kicked out of a fantasy football league for smack talk. Over the years I had removed from these cigar-smoking stockbrokers thousands of their dollars. Never finished less than third and won the pot twice. BUT when they found out I was not like them the shit hit the fan.

I swore at the commish in Italian and that was that. The only year I lost.

After that dust up my alias became “The Wife” and I continued to collect their dough. The truth is I was a faux daughter-in-law, hardly a wife, and the man who was SUPPOSED to be playing fantasy football lacked the interest and the skill and I took over. A year after my faux father-in-law, who got me into the deal, died they dumped me for good.

Not diggin’ feeling pussy-whipped.

But I was able to spot trends, rather than listen to the news and it served me well.

That league is what led me to the Sporting News for stats, info and I eventually found all of the incredible writers there, many that remain in my life today.

So yes, I live with a man that was once a lover and hasn’t been for over ten years, something Matt, an infamous TSN writer and I share in common, and he struggles with this like I do. Everyone has needed to pigeon hole my relationship despite the fact that there ain’t no marriage and we are nothing, but business partners now. The Church Lady went so far as to give me her old engagement ring after her ex, Slouchy's father (whom I truly loved) died. She said, “He would want you to have it.” but she meant I should marry her son. Your wish, your dream not mine.

As someone who knows Matthew intimately I have some words for all who would judge him. He used to always say that you should “think before doing instead of doing before thinking.” However, much of what he does in speaking (typing) makes him a contrarian and he agonizes over his lashing out.

What he feels, he feels strongly and there is nothing wrong with that. I tried to post that someone once called him a “self righteous know-it-all” and he loved it, but his post was already shut down on the TSN Face Book group.

He IS different than all of us. He is like no one I have ever known. As much as he hates, and he hates haters, he loves and he loves BIG. He loves the abused, the old, and the animals, especially the strays (something we also share), but really he is a teddy bear. He and I have been around the block, we have loved and we have fought, but we are creative partners, forever.

I promised this and I keep my promises, because he deserves a forum, a place to be heard and he reminds me every day what is important in life.

I adore you my friend and I’m always at your side, whether you feel it or not.

And just when I feel like I’ll have to kill you, I fall in love with you all over again.

It IS just smack talk afterall.

It's just words.

Some of you hear his words and hear asshole - I hear his words and say BRILLIANT!

Posted by M. Hannington at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

I dreamed I was in NYC visiting Guru and I spent a day at the Aerie alone. It was one of those massive dreams that come, full of detail, color and people I know or I’m introduced to, who are real characters with distinct personalities.

I dream whole screenplays…

It is always the same scenario, painted into different situations. I’m frantically trying to accomplish something and there are obstacles everywhere. Things fall; I knock things over and have trouble putting them back. My body fights against the paralysis it goes into when in R.E.M. sleep and I have trouble moving my limbs in these sound sleeps and sometimes physically in my dream state I have to pull my foot over a doorjamb or lift an arm up with another arm.

Things go missing often and I can never find them.

Ms. 91 has these dreams too, but they almost always take place on the golf course whereas mine are usually in places I have never been. Familiar places in the dream, but not to my waking self.

In this dream I was alone in the Aerie, there for an entire day and I napped on the floor surrounded by balls of fur. And when I took my walks to Central Park, Romeo (one of the balls of fur) would sneak out with me. We had a tussle with some feral cats that ended with me diving into a pond after him. It was a warm day and the sun would dry us both on the walk back.

In this dream the Aerie’s main room is neat and clean - freshly painted a muted peach. The room is decorated with a smattering of nice antiques and a plush oriental rug, but “The Wall” was gone.

I left my bag at the hotel and I'm walking back, ensuring Romeo isn’t following this time, when I run into a film crew. I'm asked to replace the Production Designer and hire Bill Anderson as Swing and find another Grip.

Note: I don't know anyone named Bill Anderson and Production Designers don't hire Grips.

And suddenly I am off to the races.

Faye Dunaway is starring in the film and someone comments that she moves about like a bird and I say, “Funny you should say that, it is what I have always thought too.”

The title was “Blank”: a film about “blank”. I can see the title card in my mind’s eye, but my waking self can no longer read it, it’s fading

There are a number of people on the crew that are physically odd. The director, Kevin is 3 feet tall and dressed nattily in red. Think André Benjamin from Outkast (and perhaps he was miniaturized because I had just watched André in a You Tube video and thus he looked so small).

One of the Producers is also small and similar to Andre’, but with just a mustache, sans goatee, and the other Producer is a typical white frat boy with a tight yellow T-shirt and beige cargo pants. He keeps telling me testily not to touch the storyboards that are posted on the wall.

My brother, hiding in a wheelbarrow, full with bright green Easter basket grass goes rolling by, being pushed along by a monster. This explained, I suppose, why my truck is suddenly in the middle of Manhattan full of props. I have come here for an escape and some peace and suddenly my world has found me.

Mike, a guy I have never met, is running the costume department and his set up is in the basement of the huge warehouse we are working in and he invites me down. I watch him disappear in the caged elevator and think that there is a mystery to him that I really dig.

The monster heads he creates are huge affairs worn by large men that lounge around bare-chested when not in monster mode. The heads are brightly colored, blues and reds and the hair is matted down and pure black. Most of the monsters wear suits, but some are bare-chested, men with body paint, heads shaved, that move around inside of actors’ costumes causing them to be double-headed or have arms appearing at their hips.

A group of six monsters stacked three on three as if on risers, wheel by at an angle as if they are on a refrigerator cart. All of them dressed in red suits, some with hats.

All the sets are three-sided and made of cheap foam core, but beautifully graphic and simple. One set is black with silver stripes and has a fireplace in the middle. I am busily adding red accents to that one. Another a solid Chinese red that I have placed wheat-colored grass in a vase into and have added to further with sculptures of the same hue.

Darkness has fallen and I keep thinking I should call Guru he won’t know where I am, but I can’t seem to manage it and I still haven’t gotten my bag from the hotel, which has my phone and my wallet.

The whole time I’m rushing around it’s a struggle. I leave something behind for one set and have to go back. I stop to borrow a walkie talkie from the sound guy because after a frantic search no one can seem to find any spares. My legs suddenly stop working and I have to drag myself along. A gold metal wall sculpture from the Chinese red set slides to the ground. One of the larger sets falls onto me as I sit working on the one next door.

It’s chaos!

It is a fast and furious production, sets going up and coming down. The whole look is Fellini gone Broadway musical with comic book flair. The super heroes, like the monsters, from the Aerie wall now coming to life.

The dream ended with me back at the Aerie with one of the Set Dressers from the crew. There are sandwiches layed out for us and soda and juice on ice. The two of us are renting the place for the night, at least what is left of the night, but the Set Dresser is convinced we aren’t alone. She is shouting and banging on the wall saying, “I know you’re there!”

I knew Guru would not return. I knew that New Hampshire girl wasn’t there and was sure that it had been she that had left us the spread, but could not convince this girl that she hadn’t snuck back in. She was banging away with a broomstick, outraged to be renting a place still occupied.

When I awoke New Hampshire girl had arrived with breakfast and sunlight was streaming into the room…

Then I really woke up.

In many ways this dream represents real life thoughts that I won't go into here and in many ways this April dream seems prophetic and for this reason I'm glad I wrote it down. I will indeed be working in a warehouse full of costumes and set pieces, but not with Mike and I will have a real monster, albeit singular, to deal with.

In the late eighties through the early nineties I kept a dream journal a la Castenada (google it). His suggestion was that you try and look at your hands in your dream and this would help you be a conscious participant. I worked at controlling my dreams as this particular guru suggested and one day I had an epic. It too was in a warehouse, but a broken down building full of rubble. In this dream I could save the world from a nuclear holocaust and I made the mental decision to do so. In a conscious versus unconscious way that is hard to explain.

The dream ended with a bloodied Mary sitting against the trunk of a tree and I knew that if I didn't find my hands I would die.

I did find my hands.

I awoke sitting up in bed, very much alive. I have not kept a dream journal since and I no longer know where the old one is. The merging of conscious and unconscious was unnerving.

I'm not sure I'm ready to explore it again.

This piece is dedicated to Marion, who seems to think I know something of her dreams, but if dream espionage were possible I would let her know I was coming. I'm observant, but lack the cunning of a spy.

Posted by M. Hannington at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Patiently Waiting

Anyone that knows me knows that I DIGS me some Eminem and I digs 50 too (A twofer!). Give the video some time to load... the lyrics to this song are four pages long (unhuh). The first set of lyrics (below), with a twist, could've come straight out of the mouth of an old friend with Texas in his veins. And the chorus? Heard that... yeaaah. BUT I won't be talking about anyone's flows and whether it's hot or not. Sheyeah... been there done that hoes.

Hey Em, you know you my favorite white boy, right?
I, I owe you for this one

[Chorus: 50 Cent]
I been patiently waiting for a track to explode on (Yeah!)
You can stunt if you want and ya ass'll get rolled on (It's Fifty!)
It feels like my flow has been hot for so long (Yeah!)
If you thinking I'm a fuckin' fall off ya so wrong (It's Fifty!)

[50 Cent]
I'm innocent in my head, like a baby born dead
Destination heaven
Sittin' politic with passengers from nine eleven
The Lord's blessin's leave me lyrically inclined
Shit I ain't even got to try to shine
God's the seamstress that tailor fitted my pain
I got scriptures in my brain I could spit at yo dame
Straight out the good book, look, niggaz is shook
Fifty fear no man, Warrior, swingin swords like Conan

Picture me, pen in hand writin' lines knowin the Source'll quote it
When I die, they'll read this and say a genius wrote it
I grew up without my pops, should that make me bitter?
I caught cases I copped out, does that make me a quitter?
In this white man's world, I'm similar to a squirrel
Lookin for a slut wit a nice butt to get a nut
If I get shot today my phone'll stop ringin again
These industry niggas ain't friends, they know how to pretend

Marshall Mathers grew up in Warren, Michigan in the nineties and he lived near Eight Mile Road with all the topless bars, Italian markets, corner party stores, and the homeless and hookers.

I can relate.

In the fall of 1982 I moved back to Detroit from New York City, where I was studying painting and art and hoped to complete my masters. I lived on a street called Tacoma in a small World War II saltbox house in a neighborhood full of little saltbox houses, which was a city block behind the "Player's Club" and Eight Mile Road, east of a club, which is now owned by "BT's", called "Tycoons Gentlemen's Club", where you can still get a private dance and a blow job for $100, the twins run you $150. The original BT’s was, and still is, called "The Booby Trap" and was a favorite lunch spot (the food was great!). There was something about a good steak and salad served with naked girls in the afternoon that felt comforting... a lull to a busy day.

Back then the neighborhood was largely Italian and some of the houses had additions to enlarge them, but most were teeny. I remember my neighbor had an airbrushed van with Elvis on the side. It was that kind of place. Today, there are three houses on the block that are boarded up and ramshackle and my little corner party store, which used to be a part of Detroit life, is now a closed corner bar...
for sale.

I worked on Eight Mile Road in the front office of a scrap metal factory, for my boyfriend's uncle (it still bears his son's initials), with a bunch of Indian Sihks, who called me "pretty lady" in thick accents. My guy and Bali, one of the Sikhs, were the steel salesmen. The uncle treated women like dirt. He had a huge belly that he wore his pants up high above and he would have us girls make him a special diet lunch that included diet ice cream mixed with hot water, salad with a specific dressing and other items that were only available at a specialty store. Buddha forbid you ran out of any of them.

Lunch was such a detailed affair that I always volunteered to run errands to escape it. The belly never ever shrunk anyway in all the time I knew him and despite this and his idiosyncrasies he had a girlfriend half his age, we called her the "Dragon Lady" behind her back. Lou was his name and he would often send me to truck city and the worst of those trips was the errand there to collect the checks for his charity golf event. Truck City was where dispatchers from trucking companies all over the city had offices. The place was brimming with truckers and as I walked from dispatch office to dispatch office, collecting checks from the shipping companies that hauled Lou's scrap metal, the catcalls were raucous.

Yeah? You wish fellas!

This was during the Reagan era and the neighborhood was just starting to look seedy. I didn’t make shit in those days, the furniture was a donated lot from a graduate artist friend and also consisted of whatever I had taken with me from home (most of it built by my father) and the shared rent was just $300 a month.

BUT those memories are vivid. The characters were diverse and events were large. I remember rushing out of a drive-in movie theatre one night (The Bel-Aire, now a shopping center with the same name) because we saw smoke coming from the plant. I can recall holding onto the children of one of the Indian workers as we watched the fire blaze. I still remember breathing in the spicy smell of their hair and it seemed like eons before the fire department arrived. We later moved to the milder, whiter suburbs, which I fled as fast as I could, back to the city. I went to school again, started directing at 27 and had a successful film production company by the age of 31.

Eminem was just getting started...

Marshall Mathers spent his days in Warren at a high school that borders the same street as Production Steel, a client next door to Uncle Lou's scrap metal plant, just a short walk away. According to the movie "8 Mile" he worked at a sheet metal factory. I would go on to work for Los Angeles producers on music videos and cable specials. Eminem left Warren for Los Angeles and signed with Dr. Dre to produce his first record. Prior to that he sold demos out of "Record Time" in Roseville AND a few years prior to entering the film industry I dated and worked with a DJ promoting a band he managed, under a label I designed the logo for, we sold them at "Record Time", which is closing next month.

I would later meet with Gary Glaser who won an Emmy for "Borderline: The Story of 8 Mile Road" and it was a great romp into that part of my life, but the project we discussed never came to fruition. Like Mr. Mather I had my Eight Mile story too.

Eminem was the first rapper to win three consecutive "Best Rap Album" Grammies in a row. His latest album "Recovery" was listed by Billboard magazine as the best selling album of 2010. AND here on Facebook he is the most popular person in the world with 29 million likes!

Posted by M. Hannington at 06:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Click me baby, oh click me real good!

Posted by M. Hannington at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington
Vagabond Guru

Because religious groups see abortions as murder they see ANYTHING that has to do with abortion as not being for the public good and therefore not qualified for federal funding, tax credits or subsidies DESPITE the fact that their churches DO receive federal funding, tax credits and subsidies, but I'm not here to argue separation of church and state. Just pointin' it out. With HR3 they seek to block women from buying insurance that covers these procedures EVEN if it save lives.

As a secular person I could argue that these churches do no public good as well. Catholic priests molest and abuse boys, televangelist’s enrich themselves and fool the public with fake healings, Muslim women are made to adhere to strict laws, Hindu widows, in a practice known as sutee, are burned alive on their husband’s funeral pyres and despite being outlawed outright in 1987 the practice continues today, a Catholic hospital in Arizona recently lost its affiliation with the church and a nun that worked there was excommunicated because they aborted a baby to save the mother’s life… I’m not making this shit up!

The Catholic Bishop there called it scandalous.

Then there are the little things Christians did like burning women at the stake as witches and the CRUSADES!

23 states in this country sell “Choose Life” license plates and donate the money to pro-life groups. Can you imagine the ruckus if this were reversed?

Abortions were merely a misdemeanor in this country (following English law) unless performed after the mother could feel the child (the quickening) when they were considered a felony. As methods of detecting early pregnancy improved the felony charges were later moved to earlier pregnancies. Those performing abortions were charged and not the women, but it was a difficult case to prove (the pregnancy having been terminated) and it was rarely prosecuted.

According to author Leslie Reagan, "When Abortion Was A Crime", in the early 1900’s as many as 1.2 million illegal abortions a year were being performed (including self-induced). Prior to Roe v. Wade poor women without access to expensive and safe abortion doctors often died at the hands of quacks and many more by using coat hangers or other dangerous methods on themselves in order to terminate pregnancies.

The original opponents of abortion were nativists concerned over the rise in the Catholic birth rate, anti-feminists, who also denied the rights of wives in the bedroom and doctors. Yes, doctors, who were seeking to drive the midwives and homeopaths out of business, yet whom continued to perform the procedures themselves. What they set in motion, however, cost them. Laws were formed that required they not treat a woman for abortion related trauma unless she confess, and in the case of non-married women, not only did she have to cough up the name of the doctor, who performed the procedure, but the father as well. By the 1920’s 15,000 women were dying from botched abortions every year.

Do no public good?

The nativists would be pleased to note that 28% of women receiving abortions today are Catholic and 37% Protestants and more recent estimates have them now running neck and neck.

I live in the 13th District, which encompasses downtown Detroit, Wyandotte, Lincoln Park, Harper Woods and Grosse Pointe Woods. It is presided over by Kwyame’s mommy Caroline Cheeks Kilpatrick (a real nutter), but it is John Conyers, who represents Northwest Detroit, Dearborn and the southwestern suburbs, who stood for me as a member of the House Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitution along with Jerold Nadler, who was at Stuyvesant at the same time Guru was and represents the Upper West side (where I stay when in NYC), down to Battery Park and parts of Brooklyn, where he grew up.

They both made some very cogent points, amongst the arguments by conservatives for HR3, which calls into question primarily federal funding of Planned Parenthood, and who frequently brought up descriptions of OUT OF DATE and no longer used methods of partial birth abortions in an effort to horrify the public. BUT according to the CDC’s 2006 data, the percentage of abortions that would consist of partial birth abortion are small, only 3.7% are performed after 16-20 weeks and only 1.3% are performed after 20 weeks and these are LIFE SAVING procedures. Abortion rates are down to 1.21 million, the same as they were in 1900, from almost 1.6 million in 1988.

According to a 2010 report from the Guttmacher Institute, from 1986 until 1991 teen pregnancies were on the rise, but after this time they steadily declined until 2005. In 2005, for the first time in fourteen years rates began to rise again. Surely this is due to an ever-increasing belief in abstinence education by schools (brought on by the Bush administration) and perhaps parents as well, who in large numbers leave sex education up to the educators.

I read recently that one high school in Memphis, Tennessee has eighty-six pregnant teens attending classes. Eighty-six? It turns out that more than a quarter of the school’s population of girls is pregnant.

So what do school officials do? They hire Girls, Inc., a group that promotes abstinence. Although to be fair the group does mention condoms, their main message is that girls need to learn how to say no. They claim that older male classmates prey on these girls, which in essence takes away the responsibility from these young women and forces it onto the men, when it should be BOTH.

No one “preyed” on me, it was MY decision to have sex, but no one was preaching abstinence either, they weren’t preaching anything, they were ignoring it.

My parents were children of the 40’s and 50’s and were old enough to be my grandparents. Ms. 91 nervously tried to have the “sex talk” with me and had bought me a book on sexuality. Relief spread across her face when I revealed that my best friend’s mother, a social worker, had explained this already.

My sex education at school consisted of a Disney movie in grade school and I distinctly remember Jiminy Cricket and dancing sperm, but can no longer find any reference to this film. Following the sex education movie, Nurse Ball (I swear that was her name) demonstrated the use of the sanitary pad and us girls each were provided with a belt and our very own pad.

When it came time, I was just turning twelve, I dutifully wore the thing for a day before saying, “Fuck this, get me a tampon!” I suppose in the back of my mind I knew that having a period also meant I could get pregnant, there was the book from mom after all, but not ONCE did anyone bring up birth control. I was sexually active early, to the embarrassment of my friends, and was condemned for going too far too fast, but praised for landing a hot guy as a boyfriend and screwing him.

No one suggested I protect myself and apparently the boys were as unaware as I was. When I told my college roommate I was pregnant she was shocked to find that I wasn’t using ANY form of birth control. Like so many teenagers I felt unbreakable – full of curiosity and joie de vivre.

My roommate’s mother was sixteen when she gave birth to her daughter and was a feminist, who worked at Planned Parenthood the group that the passage of HR3 would destroy, she certainly had made sure her daughter was well educated on the topic of sex.

I had read the Hite Report, knew my body and enjoyed the sexual freedom of the times. It never occurred to me, or certainly my parents (they just assumed I wasn’t doing it) that I could become pregnant. I was the product of a white suburban conservative environment and my girlfriends, while they gossiped, rarely discussed their own sexuality. I was rebelling against all of it, but I had no "sisters" to guide me.

It’s horrifying to think of it now!

That first meeting with a Planned Parenthood counselor was incredibly empowering… all the choices I never really knew or thought about, but I entered the meeting already knowing that my decision would be to end the pregnancy.

It wasn’t done cavalierly; I had some VERY good reasons.

And I have since seen what pregnancy can do to a woman.

I have read of a Catholic woman who had 27 children; she was committed to a mental institution.

A friend had three children in rapid succession and fled into homelessness and insanity.

Another has an immune disease and can no longer take part in activities that she once loved without risking death.

According to Catholic doctrine even baby's with Anencephaly (missing parts of the brain, blind, deaf, unconscious and unable to survive outside the womb) should be carried full term forcing mothers to face the risks or carrying a child only to watch them die.

This not only seems cruel... it's MEDIEVAL!

I had long ago decided to keep my last name even if I married and after delving into genealogy for some years I discovered my brother and I were the last of 7 generations of Scottish Hanningtons that I eventually traced back to Elizabethan England and the name itself goes back to Norman times.

I found a cousin in California, who hails from my Great, Great, Great Aunt Anne, who was a Hannington-Menzies. To my delight that cousin was also the last of that line, who continued to use the hyphenated name and she kept it upon marriage.

It is silly to worry about carrying on a name, I know, but I often wonder if the baby was a boy or a girl… what my life would have been like had I been a mother and there is still a wince, a pang and an empty feeling.

No man can possibly understand this.

And yet the same white men that I saw in that committee meeting are the same white men that spent decades shaming desperate women, who for whatever reason chose to have an abortion. Thousands upon thousands of us lost our lives because of it.

The year after New York legalized abortion the maternal mortality rate dropped by 45% and in the end it was the doctors that led the cry for change. They had seen enough carnage - 5,000 women (poor and mostly black and Hispanic) were dying every year because legal abortions weren't available in their state.

Do we really want to go back to THAT?

Note: Leslie J. Reagan's "When Abortion Was A Crime" won a President's Book Award from the Social Science History Association and is a work of serious scholarship.
The remainder of the statistics came from the CDC's studies and those of the Guttmacher Institute, whose reports are cited by both Democrats and Republicans.

For more on federal funding of stem cell research.

Posted by M. Hannington at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sempre libera degg´io
folleggiare di gioia in gioia,
vo´che scorra il viver mio
pei sentieri del piacer.

These are the first lines to “Sempre Libera” as sung by Anna Netrebko in the opera “La Traviata” by Verdi. They start about a third of the way through in the above video.

And below is a typical translation of the words of a woman, who will in the end decide she is giving up lovers for true love. I knew it by heart when I was a teenager, didn’t need translation, I had seen it and knew what Ms. Violetta was all about.

Free and aimless I frolic
From joy to joy,
Flowing along the surface
of life's path as I please.

Speedy (Red Sox Steve, in other parts) often suggests I play Violetta, Matthew does, but also can't. And we'll leave THAT at that. Despite the implications of it's title it's an opera I love. And below is the stupid stuff I sometimes waste hours on, but you'll need background to explain why this particular pursuit came about.

Sempre libera = Always free
Degg’io = I must be
Folleggiare = play the fool
Di giola in gioia = of joy in joy
vo´che scorra = you that it slides
Il vivio mio = living mine
Pei = ?
Sentieri de piacer = paths of pleasure

"Sempre Libera" is easy, but many of the words are dialect or archaic "degg'io" is like "devo" a version of "devere" and I could never figure out "pei", but all the above are shown as straight translations.

Long ago I booked a trip with Slouch to Florence to spend five nights in an old de Medici palace, the plan being to see the sights and take some time to enjoy the countryside and the wine. The Church Lady was a travel agent at the time and it was unbelievably cheap. I spent months learning Italian, read a two volume set on the de Medici family and scoured the internet to learn about the region. Like most operas all ended in tragedy - my soul died along with a beloved dog the day before - I couldn't bring myself to go.

So, I had studied the Italian language, loved the opera and I was sure that Violetta didn’t “frolic” nor was she particularly "aimless". I spent hours trying to come up with my own translation, a more modern less patronizing one.

I must always be free to
flow from joy to joy.
To glide through my life
on the path of pleasure.

After all I'm hosting sexpert Susie Bright in a month and I think she would dig that. And it is something that I lost sight of in a complicated life. Freedom.

Sempre Libera!

Posted by M. Hannington at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Stand by Me by Ben E. King

There are lots of Lennon songs I could of chosen for this, but I had something on my mind when I chose this one. I love the way he performs this and the fact that his son Julian, an equally talented guitarist, is performing it with him makes it even better.

This weekend CNN will air their documentary, "Losing Lennon: Countdown to Murder". It will join a batch of several other docs that AGAIN will examine the murder and death of John Lennon at the hands of Mark Chapman, including a PBS offering, "Lennon NYC" which aired at the end of November and focused primarily on his life in New York. Chapman, a schizophrenic, had eerily obtained Lennon's autograph on an album that day prior to shooting him four times in the back.

Lennon died on December 8, 1980. VG's Red Sox Steve would become a mere three year old on that same day (HAPPY BIRTHDAY SPEEDY!), but I was in my peace-protesting-prime! I was always more of a Stones than a Beatles gurl, preferring darker music to some of the jaunty stuff the Fab Four put out, but LENNON? He was iconic, representing free love, peace and brotherhood and making us believe it was possible to have a better world. His death was like the assassination of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, all men who sought to move us forward in a world that seemed to be moving horribly backwards.

"We’ve got this machine, and we’ll try and make use of it, for good, and not just to have a machine."

It is a day in which I will celebrate the lives of two of the most important men in my life. One gone, that I will ever be missing and the other VERY much living and living a life that any man should be proud to emulate. I, for one, am SO proud of the way he uses his intellect, offers his wisdom and how he listens and really hears.

And then there's the way you ALWAYS happen to be in mid-masturbation every time we Skype? How you make me smile.

Celebrate your day babay, celebrate your day our Red Sox Steve.

Thanks for always standing by me.

Posted by M. Hannington at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

Two questions stabbed me in my heart tonight.

Mom:

"You want your cats you know the machine in the wacudda?"

Me Bloke:

"Mahwee, will you mail me me cap?"

The first one is Ms. 91’s brain misfiring, unable to find the right words, but she pretends to be making perfect sense. Inside somewhere she still knows that it’s gibberish and I know that what she really wants is for me to eat her leftover fish when I get home from a night's work.

She is worried about me.

The second is the Bloke's way of saying “I’m heartbroken and I’m done with the film, with our vision.”, which would only make us both cry.

I stole his cap one day and told him I was going to keep it. He said “You’d have to fight me boy for it, he loves wearing that cap.” and I gave it back, who could steal from a little boy, who loves wearing his father’s cap? BUT, instead the Bloke, he put it on my head backwards and he said, “It suits you that way Mahwee.” I wore it around the production office on bad hair days, it covered hair that he described as being "rolled up with bangers the night before."

Bangers are British for sausage and he KNOWS that I speak British.

I remember the day that he and the boy from Oz drink their cokes, "black doctors" they call them, and belch long and loud while we chat. No longer rude because I'm now one of the boys.

Tonight I skipped a meal with the crew to take a call, at 4:00AM, from my "other bloke", who wants to roll me over in bed (assume he imagines I'm lying on my back and that he's drunk) and the next day I will read a note from the Philosopher, who apologizes for the Boy's rudeness and sends his love. I like the rudeness and I like being loved.

A drunk dial is the kind of fun that washes away the pain of a bad night, but my battery is down and the phone cuts out. I leave the now empty film set, end up bent over talking on a short cord and can't use the speaker because I'm in a room with the son of a man, who worked with me for years and whose idea of porn is a racy deck of cards from 1960. It's comical.

And the drunken Boy, he tells me I'm unavailable... that hurt.

He called me an idiot... that doesn't.

Tonight the Diva calls me a nitwit… then turns tail and tells me it is she that is the nitwit. She says that when she lashes out at me, she is really lashing out at herself. The boy from Oz kisses the top of my head for pulling off the impossible and because he feels the pain of making this film. WE know it's the end.

And that "other bloke" is a stupid Boy!

I’m the most available woman in the world. Ask my crew, ask every department, ask me Bloke on this film, my heart is open to whoever needs it. Not to those who would crush it, but to the needy and to those who would hold it like the Philosopher, like the stupid Boy.

Like no one else does.

There's always a Bad Egg on a film crew, he belongs to me, an abusive type that doesn't match my style. I notice he has two cell phones, I suspect I know why and newer evidence seals the deal. I'm better off without the friction his behavior has caused. We have a department head meeting, all ask that I fire him and I concur. The Bloke would be happy for me, but he is not here and, as usual, neither is the Bad Egg.

It is now six in the morning, it will have to wait.

This film has been a long journey, I miss life, I miss my Guru. He is sound asleep on a foam mat - traveling in his mind, playing, thinking, creating - and soon I will be asleep on a foam-padded couch. The sun will rise over both of us. His a half an hour before mine... soon. He is devoted to those that fill his days. I’m devoted to those that fill mine until it stops…

This tale is of a night long gone by, but there is always a Film, a Bloke (or two), a Bad Egg, a Diva... Red Sox Steve (my Speedy) will sometimes sleep here in his room or there (where he belongs) or in some foreign land and so will I, except my foreign lands are memories. Guru will do his thang and I will do mine. I will always have a dog that will leave me or miraculously stay longer than anyone thought, so will he.

Before we met we wrote and wrote and wrote and that work was wiped away like my Zen teacher used to wipe away my drawings. It is the doing that matters, not the work itself. After we met we started anew. Our lives are chaotic when we both want calm, but we are used to reinventing ourselves, it'll come.

Peace and oh God privacy, but not stagnation, never that.

Today I remembered holding Trout, a cat, in my arms and today Matthew held Scout, a dog, in his. Both these critters may never feel my arms again, but I KNOW they are loved.

None of it ends...

Life is a circle.

Universes, Galaxies, Stars, Planets, Land Masses, Countries, Communities, Creatures, Vegetation, Bacteria, Cells....

What was, shall be again."

Posted by M. Hannington at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

I love to cook Thanksgiving dinner and for many years Thanksgiving meant an adventure.

In happier days, Slouch and I would pile the dogs in the car, put the fresh Turkey on ice and head to the Cumberland Mountains for the Tennessee Aerie, high on the cliffs. It was a beautiful, peaceful place designed by my father (gone nine years now) to emulate Frank Lloyd Wright's style and fit into the landscape.

In order to do this the builders had to blast eight feet down in to a wide swath of solid rock.

And, oh hell, I'm blasting through this one!

First, the salesman questioned the logic of buying this sloping rocky piece of land. “You’re never gonna be able to build on that, don’t know what y’all want it fer.” The builders thought he was nuts too. The plan called for the house to be placed smack in the middle of the property, which meant the front of the house was ten feet below the level of the road and the back of the house, even further down, more like seventeen feet.

Dad and architect friend, Chet Stempien knew what they were doing and the carport rose up six feet closer to the level of the road and a walkway hovered over the rocky landscape peppered with azaleas and other local flora to reach a front door that was 10 feet above the ground.

Enter that front door and you faced a glass wall that had an impressive view of distant mountains and lakes.

It was spectacular!

The island kitchen had all the modern amenities, a stainless steel prep area connected to the sink, a convection oven, Jenson stove (with grill), and a full set of Calphalon pots and pans. These remain in a box in my garage (you just don’t know what Slouchy can do to a pan!).

Back then we used to watch the Lions. Back then things were swell.

Now? Not so much.

I sometimes cook the Turkey across the street for a party of six (David and John join us), but Ms. 91 is used to having Thanksgiving at home and my house is now her home. Judy’s daughter is home with a new baby and this year David is cooking.

A more complicated trip than a walk across the street.

Ms. 91 has an invite to my sister-in-law’s family shindig, but there are like thirty-two frickin’ grandchildren, uh a crowd, and no one mentioned me anyway. The turkey is twenty pounds, that's over three pounds a piece. I buy it fresh every year.

Doesn't matter, I'm a vegetarian, I will make a myriad turkey sandwiches, Turkey Tetrazzini, Turkey carrcass soup and we will eat forever.

AND Slouchy hates going to Capital Poultry, where the newly beheaded birds come sliding through a window and are defeathered, cleaned and prepped while you stand in line with another dozen customers waiting for yours.

Sometimes they're still warm.

It's a yearly argument, who will go fetch the turkey, but even that has changed. Capital Poultry closed this year and the fresh turkey is out front in clean display cases in the market next door.

And I used to thrill to the agony of watching Slouch work himself up to facing the horror of knowing birds were being killed only a room away! Can't eat them when they're alive.

Oh damn, life's simple pleasures.

It will be an interesting gathering. It’s an interesting house!

Slouchy has watched for weeks as I pack up his shit. The old school clock just went on the pile. And it has now disappeared.

Oh for fuck sake!

There has been a war with the closet. For a week he slept with the clothes on hangers I had piled on the bed (the closet has been scraped down and is ready for touch up paint). BUT the clothes have been rehung and I’ll soon remove them again along with the dirty laundry that seems to spread like a fungus across the room so that I can AGAIN unearth surfaces that need to be cleaned.

Ms. 91 has been fighting with the dog all week. He steals her Kleenex and won’t give it back and I need to get a sponge because, “The dog drooled on Daddy’s ashes!” These she keeps on the floor next to her feet. She knows they are just remains, she believes his soul is gone and there is no heaven, but she still talks to his ashes.

Someday hers will fly together with his off the cliffs of Black Mountain.

A part of the Earth. A part of the nature they both loved.

In the summer, Ms. 91 gets my Sid Vicious style doo. Short! Now that it’s colder we have decided to let it grow. Yesterday she became frustrated with the side that is straighter and doesn’t have the nice waves the other side has, so she cut if off.

Gretchen, a new Mom, and former hairdresser in for a visit, was tremendously amused by descriptions of the recent stylings of 91. Sid Vicious, long and scrunched with curling gel, a trim when she got sick of the curls that resulted in a side part and a straighter style, which grew into the wave thing on the one side and the straight thing on the other.

91 asks me if it looks even.

You know the haircut you gave yourself when you were five years old?

Yup, that’s about it.

So the scissors, a comb and her special shampoo and conditioner go into the gym bag and off to the Y for a pool class, a shower and a much-needed trim.

Oh and I just found the clock. It’s in the bedroom! The room I’m trying to CLEAN out!

Jesus!

There is always drama here or maybe it's Theatre of the Absurd.

Ms. 91 decides to send Slouchy to the store the other day. I know this because I overhear their conversation. “Quaker Oats chewy bars, bananas, Depends and paper towel.” I’m frantically trying to keep the kitchen in it’s “pre-Slouchy’s return” condition and I see there are no bananas and there is a box of variety pack flavored oatmeal on the table.

Shopping is almost always a twofer for Slouch.

“Did you buy Ms. 91 her Quaker Oats chewy bars?”

“YES! They’re on the sideboard.”

“Then why is there a box of flavored oatmeals in the kitchen?”

“Because I thought those were chewy bars and I went BACK to the store to get her chewy bars.”

“Where are the bananas?”

“I FORGOT THE BANANAS!”

When the left side of your body goes numb, is that bad?

I’m cooking a stuffed turkey, smashed garlic redskins, and green beans with almonds. There will be cranberries and stuffing and yams with a bit of brown sugar and the ginger Speedy brought me from India grated on top.

A ninety-three year old woman with a lopsided haircut, a confused man, who will soon cross the pond never to return and I will sit down to a Thanksgiving dinner at a table in the main parlor because Ms. 91 sleeps in the dining room.

Wooly Bully, a dog that likes Kleenex, will like all dogs watch with anticipation. It will be a first for him. We eat in our own spaces. Ms. 91 is served in her room on my old rolling reading table. Slouch eats in the kitchen, where in the morning you will be able to take a guess at his dinner based on the color of the sauce on the refrigerator door. Me? I'm camped out in Speedy's room, an upstairs parlor, ensuring that the new pile of dirty clothes from the nearby closet don't spread any further. Ms. 91 is the only one who has it right.

This Thanksgiving may be Ms. 91’s last, I never know, so she gets the works.

I’ll spend the day in the now semi-clean kitchen putting as much love into this meal as I can.

Oh and I'll be doing the shopping!

Posted by M. Hannington at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

“Sounds never dissipate, they only recreate in another place and time.”

I’ve been busy, overly challenged and dog-less, something I haven’t been for almost 25 years, but for a little while now I’ve been fostering a Black Chinese Sharpei.

My house almost always had a bevy of cats and a couple of dogs, sometimes a random stray or sometimes all mine.

But my life has changed. I’ve always had my own company, still do, but I work on feature films and I am on THEIR schedule now.

Not MINE.

A bevy of warm fur is not a happy bevy of fur when it doesn’t have a mom for sixteen hours.

And Dad?

He showers at night and then crawls underneath a duvet that hasn’t been washed in 11 years. I’m afraid he’s a goner. Kicked to the curb. Packed up and left for dead.

Soon to be sailing in uncharted waters.

I spent a lot of time today reading the columns on our lives in “Life in the Aerie” and emotions and memories flooded into my noggin setting off sobs and giant smiles and sensations not to be described.

The Aerie was much like my backroom, that last was filled with (now tame) cats or kittens lazing around on every level. The windowsill, the dresser, part of an old bedstead with a bookshelf or on the floor whacking around a toy. Little Alvin loved them, he would make himself small so as not to scare them and avert his gaze. Soon enough he was being nose-bumped and pounced upon.

Sleepless in Detroit

Sometimes the folks that we love have amazing parallels to our own lives and sometimes there’s the Yin to the Yang - phases that are out of sync.

The Aerie would easily fit in my Main Parlor. It’s too much house for an old lady and I. And there are far too many things in it. I’m gonna need a crew! The movie props alone have taken over two rooms and Ms. 91’s (pulling a Steve Martin) “All I need is this chair and this ashtray, that’s all I need…” has taken over a two-car garage.

Fuck I should just open my own EBay store. And just to sell my crap, the other customers would have to be turned away.

The Sharpei will leave like the feral kittens and cats I have raised, the last batch even took walks on harnesses - Ms. 91 and I will be alone.

With the crap…

Called Shå Pî or Sand Skin in China because when their fur is rubbed against the grain it is prickly, but soft, especially on the head when rubbed the other way. They were dogs of the nobility and they were almost wiped out by the Communist regime for being too bourgeois.

Imagine me with a bourgeois dog!

At one time they were the most rare of all the dog breeds in the world.

Hailing from Guangdong province (much farther south than my beloved Red Sox Steve has traversed), they are most closely related to the Chow Chow, who also have black tongues and mouths; something the Chinese believe will ward away evil spirits.

They are funny little dogs and have always reminded me of the feral kittens I have raised. I knew those kittens had “turned” when they gave me a nose bump. From then on they were no longer hissing little gremlins, but purring snugglers.

Like cats, Sharpei love to rub up against you, mark the furniture with their muzzles, stick their heads in bags and yes, give you nose bumps. I am familiar with the breed because I have seen so many come and go. There was Oscar, then Babe, Honey Bear, Roscoe (my boyfriend, we loved each other big time) Hannah, and Zeus, who once had to have his head shaved and looked just like a wrinkled old monk. Then followed Kimba, Gus, Hannah and now there is Duncan, Marley, Tabbitha, Shin Soo and Bully, who lives with me.

You are right Speedy. Neighbor Judy DOES watch too much Fox News, but she loves on those dogs, she watches over David, who just lost his beloved Mindy, and she loves on 91 too.

I have found homes for over 16 cats and kittens since the last half decade and I’m currently feeding Black II, a real beauty and a black and white cat appropriately named Obama. (think about it.)

They are ferals and they take care of themselves. They don’t really care if I’m gone for 16 hours. “Just put the fish, yogurt and veggie mix in the damn bow will yal!”

And it’s been ten years since there has been a black dog in this house (another unwanted dog like my Memphis). But then my tastes have changed.

I prefer redheads now.

Today VG.com lost its redhead and Guru’s heart is broken.

And his Mary has gone through 2 days of copious salt-water facials.

Scout will forever be memorialized all over VagabondGuru.com. We all adored him.

I didn’t meet Mr. Matthew Barron Storey until after a year of intense emails and long phone calls passed us by and when I finally made my way to NYC? My first kiss came from Matt and my second came from Scout, who loved me just ‘cause.

I’ll never forget meeting him on the stairs one night and the soft warm tongue baths, how he loved to cuddle, how his eyes shined when he saw me.

He lived for “longandlong” in the Aerie with an assortment of cats.

On A Morning Walk

Scout has been around the country and a constant companion to a vagabond.

None of my dogs have traveled with me to New York to London to Paris or the Detroit suburbs and then to the city and the dog in Alabama was only borrowed. Two endured a move and only one came on the rare camping expeditions. I haven’t had a vacation in… I REALLY can’t remember, only business trips with time for a dinner, a drive or a movie.

Memphis was one that took a trip. Do I really have to tell you where from?

And Memphis had a song.

Around the time I would get my first dog, albeit a shared one for a while, I had a song. A college roommate was determined to teach me to sing it. This involved, breathing exercises, diaphragm control and singing while holding a chair.

The whole thing was silly.

Even worse, was the song I picked to learn. It was "I'll Write A Song For You" by Earth, Wind and Fire.

This song is sung by Phillip Bailey, who is a falsetto with a beautiful voice and I’m a mezzo soprano that leans to contralto and I had to sing it an octave lower and despite the fact I somehow made the high school choir I never really could sing and I could never match his range.

Absurd!

Nonetheless, I still LOVE to sing this song, cupping one ear to my mouth like she taught me to in order to hear the notes and I could sing it until I’m a Ms. 91 and never get it right.

Memphis, my redheaded boy would often come sit beside me and I would lift his earflap and sing it quietly into his ear. His ear sometimes twitched, but he never flinched until I was finished.

I did it because I believed the song was true. The whole time we were together we wrote each other songs of love and they stay with you forever. They go into that magic box that is the heart you shared and they never leave you.

For Guru there will be no more beef jerky kisses or holding of hands except in his heart.

He doesn’t need to tell me how he grabbed his fur.

I know.

Posted by M. Hannington at 05:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Xīn Xiù
American Poet and Author

He fascinated me; intelligent, charming, but with a temper slowly burning inside. A musician of sorts and a poet. I suppose I loved him from the start, but I wouldn’t have told you that then.

My old suitor was pulling away and the strain I felt from that was just a buzz, but the poet? He could stab and slap and punch. Our friendship was like a patchwork quilt with random blue squares, one day we’d be dashing down the street hand in hand, laughing and dancing. Swapping words and staring into each other’s minds. Then he’d be gone.

He went to see the singing girl after she had put out her sign. On Wednesday morning he was outside her door, all blurry-eyed and stumbling. When he didn’t show up to the pub for his usual noontime performance, I knew.

He had recently spent some time with me chatting, but that had all but stopped.

The newspaper man told me he was busy, but I knew better. I’d see him on street corners with that glazed-over look, staring across to where she lived or walking amongst the trees looking up at the stars. I suddenly remembered he was almost never without a hat and it made me smile a sad smile.

For three years we had walked together, traveling sometimes and trading wits like marbles. It had been hell, but mostly heaven.

And even heaven seems to have an ending.

From time to time he’d peel out some words, full of love lost and sadness and pain. I didn’t believe in the sadness anymore, like a blues song without the blues, it had lost its pangs and strains of low violins.

The last time I saw him it was many days after that December’s day, an important day for us. It had been the day we met. After that I flew away.

I often think of him, shy and awkward at first, then blossoming into his own.

All the young school girls flocking around him and he, big and strong, looking very much like a hero. Making them blush and unbutton their blouses a notch.

His kind of love was a strange kind, never steady, but swirling and whirling, ever changing. It was sometimes exhilarating, sometimes bewildering, but at its best it was calming.

I became a poet myself, but not the same kind.

As I sit here, ready to die at any moment. I wish myself back to the poet. Sneaking into a stairway he kisses me and I feel youth well up in my old bones and I smile and I am at peace.

The doctor said my heart could go at any minute, but I knew it already had.

Posted by LITA Staff at 05:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

With Christine O’Donnell in the news (anti-masturbation) and articles of recent memory that the British are promoting masturbation, as healthy, to schoolchildren (pro-masturbation) I have some thoughts.

Apparently people think about masturbation a lot.

Not that all would admit to this, but let’s be honest people find all sorts of ways to get off by themselves. I have a friend who is doctor and she can reel off a large list of items found stuck in human orifices, but I won’t go there.

Number four on the best selling hits list in Vagabond Guru’s Culture section (we ain’t no Obama Girl sensation, so take it with a grain of salt) is a piece I wrote entitled “Onanism” and for a long time it was the most read article on our site.

Onanism

I’m not going to explain who Onan was or go into any of the biblical history here (read the damn article!), but it is clear people are searching this topic on the web. Onanism is an archaic term for male masturbation. Of the top cultural articles it is the one that people spent the most time with (at least according to Google’s Analytics) AND no it wasn’t because they were whacking off.

It was an intellectual article and with the exception of a small photo of Shere Hite nude - which based on the one comment I received, may have caused SOME whacking off - was never meant to titillate.

Presumably these bouts of solo pleasure are taking place in private. So why is it news?

You would think the abstinence crowd would promote masturbation as a logical way of abstaining, but they appear to be against lust in general. If you read the abovementioned article you’ll see that it is hard to make a biblical argument against masturbation or homosexuality for that matter.

And doesn’t the bible say go forth and multiply?

Just keep lust out of it?

Seems to me that taking the bible literally is likely to confuse some folks!

See here then come back… I’ll wait.

Children experience sexual sensations at often very young ages, long before they are given any sex education. Girls don’t tell me you didn’t twiddle your twats at one point, only to be told by the nuns in Catholic school you shouldn’t EVEN be touching your thighs!

It’s a true story I knew a woman that was afraid to touch her own thighs.

Which gets you to thinkin’ if you can’t touch your thighs and you can’t touch your twat how the hell are you going to wash, put on lotion (not to mention those thigh highs you were wearing under the usual uniform, the short plaid skirt), what a sponge on a stick?

And guys? Please! I don't I know of ONE man that has never had a wee wank, especially the crowd around here!

And in my family, including me granddad, dad and brother.

Wee Wank

And I’m willing to bet that plenty of Tea Partiers go home and have private parties of their own.

Try to follow me here. If God made us and God gave even children (blessed are the children) these sensations then what the hell was he thinking?

Please explain.

I’ve gone through stages where I have been a rabbit (God made them too. How come they get away with it?) and stages where I have locked on the chastity belt and said, “Girl you got some shit to do, no time for pleasure.”

I’ve lived platonically with a man for countless years. The sexual relationship ended over some sheets and to be honest there was nobody else I really wanted in those years… I got picky.

And it wasn't sex that drove me to want to separate it was sanity.

Yes, Buddhism teaches me that sex sometimes interferes with your path and Buddha knows sometimes it does. That your dukkha or dissatisfaction with life is rooted in desire. Take away the desire and you open up your path to enlightenment. It does not however condemn you for having sex, but merely points out that these constant desires are a roadblock.

If I meditate and do Hatha yoga daily I can be at peace with a lack of nookie, but that is just me and really it is nobody's business.

What the fuck (we ARE talking about sex) does any of this have to do with the state of the nation?

If everyone in America stopped fucking would we be better off?

Yeah, porno sales might go up, but if no one is screwing they'd eventually run out of new ones and since masturbation is off the list? Porno would just get old. A trip down memory lane, ah remember the days.

Lingerie sales may go down (Victoria's Secrets closing everywhere!) and certainly diaper sales might suffer in the future, but really what effect would it have and why the fuck is it a part of political speak at at all?

Because Christine and Sarah, who have done their fair share of fucking, know that this will get them the Tea Party vote and namely the evangelicals. Go back and watch the Bill Hicks video again.

Do you REALLY want these folks running the show.

If you think it is a sin for a woman to have an abortion then for Christ sake (excuse the expression) won’t she burn in hell for it and then everyone is happy?

She thinks she won’t, you think she will… there we go, even, done.

As far as religious laws go. Why not let God, Allah and whomever decide… we fuck up? Lightening strikes us. Do we need to let it interfere in how we govern our country or school our children?

If Clinton spent 5 hours a day putting cigars up interns twats I'd be concerned, but he didn’t.

It was just a fling. Get over it.

Please Note:

Evangelist Scandals

Dedicated to the only man, who could really make me laugh, which is often better than whacking off! Always in my heart enova.

Posted by M. Hannington at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As much as possible I try to STEAL these videos and so keep them in our archives for posterity. I couldn't steal this one, but it is a classic that deserves to be here and if I have to keep updating a You Tube link I will.

Posted by M. Hannington at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

I’m reading a good article on Afghanistan in the New Yorker, but I HATE that magazine. It’s a stinking magazine full of articles with dirty words. Why do they have to do that?

Ms. 91

Clearly she hasn’t lived with me long enough!

But now the days grow short
I’m in the autumn of the year
And now I think of my life as vintage wine
from fine old kegs.

Frank Sinatra – It Was A Very Good Year

And it ain’t fucking over yet kids!

Sorry Ms. 91.

I DO think of my life now as vintage wine and the fine kegs that have held it have been something special. Kegs made from the mighty oak that made me strong and sherry kegs, which were sweet and warm and made me feel delicious.

When I was 35 I was on top of the world.

A conqueror.

I became my own boss, the queen of the castle…

I never lost sight of 17 or 21, years of growth, of struggle, of love’s disappointments and of learning the world and myself. I was almost never bitter or melancholy, I moved on from love and I lived life to the fullest. I almost never felt alone, though I lived by myself.

Somewhere after 35 there was a crash. For a time there I was just floating… looking for a piece of flotsam to grab onto and I found me some. I’m making films again, telling stories and it is something I love. And most important of all I found my Guru, who is the best of the kegs, all of which have held my life and enriched it with wisdom not to be found on my own.

An exotic wood to be sure, he added the spice.

And he was the piece of flotsam that brought me back to shore.

Now that I’ve been here for awhile I realize that floating was easier, but not as fulfilling. A lot has hit me this year, near death, death, cruelty, delusion, utter madness, but amongst it all has been joy and discovery.

Silly me I thought my life would get easier, but that was just wishing. One of those planning for retirement commercials… Hah!

Empty your mind of all thoughts.
Let your heart be at peace.
Watch the turmoil of beings,
but contemplate their return.

Lao-Tzu

I worked with a man, who wrote down what he told you to do in a little black book, so if you failed he could easily point it out to you. I never saw the inside of that little black book, but he called me a failure nonetheless.

He wished me to be useless and tried to make it so and in doing so he only made me more useful.

I took a vacation from Zen.

In despair, I have struggled against what is, I felt alone even when surrounded.

I’ve decided to face loneliness by being alone.

To go away to a foreign land... To be alone, truly alone amongst strangers, who will find me strange.

I dig being strange.

I recently reconnected with a friend, who I remember as always searching for something. He hopped trains, was in and out of my life, he found Jesus and he came to me for haircuts.

I always wondered if he found what he was looking for (Jesus wasn't it I was sure) and what IT was in the end, I want to know.

He offered me the use of his house in a small village in France and you know what? It is exactly what I need.

Funny that.

If not, it’ll be a tent in the woods somewhere north of here (the business of renewing my passport after all still lies in a large pile).

I feel like Steinbeck and Charley, albeit sans my Charley.

I need to find peace in my heart and I need that peace to come from within me.

Wherever I go I’m touched by people’s lives and sometimes they have lifted me up as I have tried to lift them and I have learned and will continue to learn about love, about the world and about life.

It was a very good year and it ain’t fucking over yet.

Sorry again, Ms. 91!

This wine has and will be held in some very fine kegs.

You can slosh it around all you like. You can spill it, but you can’t take away the fact that it IS vintage and the aging is what makes it special.

Posted by M. Hannington at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

My heart is broken.

Stress cardiomyopathy, also referred to as the “broken heart syndrome,” is a condition in which intense emotional or physical stress can cause rapid and severe heart muscle weakness (cardiomyopathy). This condition can occur following a variety of emotional stressors such as grief, fear, extreme anger, and surprise.

My heart has been damaged and not in the metaphorical sense.

It is slight, I can’t feel it and you can barely see it on the EKG., but it is there.

The doctor looked at me with his big brown eyes close to my face and said, “Mary you’re not going to die, but it IS your heart.”

I have to fix my life.

Everybody goes through stress in life and yoga and meditation have saved me from some very difficult periods in the paths I have taken. I have meditated away the pain from third degree burns, from long term loves that suddenly swerved from that joint path, from the loss of a father I was just getting to know again.

But sometimes one thing leads to another.

Ms. 91 came very close to dying and under those kinds of circumstances I’m very calm. It’s the emotions that hit afterwards that are sometimes hard to bear.

I’m ending a relationship that in reality ended a long time ago.

Slouchy is using the dog, Little Alvin (since writing this he has been put to sleep peacefully at home in the backyard), to try and stop this from happening. Despite the fact that I have asked him to leave me alone, explained that I’m in Cali not just to fulfill my Union duties, but to take time for myself. He constantly texts and calls and I ignore, ignore, ignore.

To those of you who think I live a glamorous life hobnobbing with the stars?

I don’t.

Yes, I make movies but, stars are just people and don’t enhance your life or sweep you off to Never Never Land. They just are, like we just are.

I sit and figure out how to pay the bills like everyone else. And those bills are massive. The truth is I have been living beyond my means for a long time, I am asset rich and cash poor… not an ideal thing to be. The medical bills for 91 and now for me, mean that more is going out than is coming in.

I’m eligible for insurance again based on hours worked in July, but the MPHIP, egad more initials, need time to process me. Despite the fact they have received thousands of dollars from me to cover benefits.

They need a paperwork moment, a two-month paperwork moment.

This will be my last column in a while I think. Writing honestly about what are strong emotions (like this) sometimes takes me days. And it IS carthartic, but I no longer have those days. You may get the stuff that comes out of me like a whirlwind sometimes, an hour’s effort at most, but not the brutally honest soul searching or the rants at stupidity or the researched subjects I love to learn about, those are all the real reason I write.

See Speedy on India for that.

I’ve been working on VG since its inception long before the July 4th, 2008 launch date and I’m tired. It takes up SO much of my time. Time I can’t afford to waste and I don’t mean to say that VG is a waste of time, I love it and I feel at home here, but in reality I no longer have a home and I have to find my space on this earth.

So from now on if I’m to consider you a friend you must realize that my heart has suffered and I won’t ever let it happen again. Don't treat me gently, but DO treat me nice.

I will not waste my time in idle pursuits. I want JOY not fame, but sustainable joy not pipe dreams.

I want to come home to a place that I am loved or at least a place that I’m alone and peaceful.

That would do.

Posted by M. Hannington at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

I like this hotel. Despite the fact that the last two days have been more hectic and more frantic than I would have liked, it’s a good, restful place for me. Like my home in Detroit near Jefferson Ave. with its car haulers and the Belnord Hotel in NYC, it is off the beaten path, Santa Monica and Wilshire Blvd., the former is just off Broadway Ave. with its endless cabs and buses.

I like the hum of the city, but it has to be muted.

The hotel is built around a beautiful courtyard where I go to have my smoke breaks in various stages of undress, a bikini, a GIANT beige hotel robe that makes me look like a potato, or a zebra stripped baby doll, more for comfort than sleep wear, I love the feel of the fabric. Like the Belnord it is run very efficiently by a Hispanic staff, who don’t seem to notice or care that I’m never dressed. They are always very friendly with me.

Hey now, maids and bellhops alike.

I’ve been thinking a lot about human contact lately (the lack I’ve had thereof) and last night was a great example of how humanity, when it is thrown together, can all find common ground.

At the bar I met some folks from Phillie (I could tell by the accent, not quite Boston and not New York) they hear the Northeast in my voice too. They are HUGE baseball fans, I’m about to embark on a baseball project AND the Phillies just beat the Twins, so they are immediately cool with me.

Amando, who is superb at running the little restaurant here and always gives me a HUGE pour at the bar and for reasons of which I will reveal later, I try not to spend too much time with, was keeping our glasses full. And Laura with the dogs, a Pit Bull and a Dobie, who have been my best friends for the last three days, popped in sans her husband Everett, who is also lovely, but give me a dog over a man any day! Laura, who is a Scot like me and so my babe, lives at the hotel.

AND Laura has news! One of the restaurant’s frequent guests, an oriental woman, presumed to be the daughter of the CEO of Sanyo…

The “presuming” needs to be explained. Amando is an acute listener and observer and he knows all about me from the conversations he has overheard, as well as the conversations we have actually HAD.

At any rate, it turns out that this Chanel bag toting, Bentley driving beauty is not really what Amando has wiretapped with his sensitive hearing, because she is in the Los Angeles Times and the story says she is from a poor family, who came to America. The 13 suitcases of ganja police found in her trunk help to explain the Bentley and the Chanel.

The mug shot in the paper – this will become an important part to the story – reveals that this “Mystery Woman” was without her customary false eyelashes.

By now, it’s just the three of us and the stories start to fly. They know all about Slouchy and our separation. That he knows my recent health woes, for which I am supposed to avoid things like Amando’s ability to hold a bottle upside down for just a wee bit longer than he should, are partially his fault. Despite all this he has been constantly texting and calling about our ailing dog as a desperate means of reconnecting and I’ve been ignoring him (I’ve seen Alvin’s labs and talked to the vet)… let it go.

I'm here to relax and forget about bad relationships, not revisit them.

Laura met Everett, while working off a 20K divorce bill, doing errands for a wealthy man in London. She is hoping to introduce me to Gino, a filmmaker, who travels the world and is a frequent guest at the hotel and apparently Gino is the kind of guy, who could buy me Chanel bags (that is if I gave a fuck about Chanel bags).

Here’s where it gets a little bit complicated and for anyone that knows me intimately, great material for a Shakespearean Comedy.

Amando loves the Mystery Woman’s Chanel bags and false eyelashes and Gino was recently smitten by a Malaysian woman, who, a la Lola, was really a man and since then Amando has dreamed of dressing in false eyelashes and donning those Chanel bags in front of Gino in hopes of attracting his attention.

“No problem.” I laugh, “Since I graduated high school I have never NOT had a cross dressing man in my life.” "I can get you size 9 stilettos and a size 16 dress" I tell him, "We'll hit up one of the cops with some change and get you one of those Chanel bags and baby I used to work as a makeup girl so we're good to go there too!"

If you saw Amando you'd understand the challenges... think football player and he has a beard.

There are plenty of cross dressers in the feature film industry here, we'll set you up. I told them the story of a producer, who received a call from a rugged old star of the war picture he was working on. The star demanded to see him immediately. It was midnight and the producer was at the cross dresser bar (in full regalia) and had to send the A.D. instead. The rest of the tale was bizarre indeed, but I can't mention the star's name and I have no room for it here anyways.

And as far as Gino goes? Amando, I'm happy to share, just keep pouring like you do.

Note: This story was posted from Delta flight 1906 while nearing the shores of Lake Michigan. Ain't technologyy great? The names have been changed to protect the innocent or guilty 'cuz I like guilty better.

Posted by M. Hannington at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

Been to a lot of cities….

Paris, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Brussels, Toronto, Stratford (both of them), Cancun, Tulum (an ancient city)…

San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Birmingham, Mobile, St. Louis, Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, Honolulu, Hilo, Pittsburgh, Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, Key West (Is that a city or an island? Great experience anyway!), Tampa Bay, New Orleans, Atlanta, Salt Lake City (There is a big fucking lake there.), Las Vegas, Reno, Tempe, Phoenix, Dallas, Jackson Hole, Houston, Brownsville, Sante Fe, Chicago, Toledo, Cleveland…

Oh yeah and D.C and of course New York.

I’ve been to North Dakota and South Dakota, but I’m not sure there were any cities there.

Been through the state of Arkansas, don’t remember any cities there either just swamps.

My three favorites, in this order, are New York, London and Toronto.

Sorry San Francisco friends… I’ve decided, too damn hilly.

I need humanity about me, everyday humans “the common man”. It’s a Zen thing; they calm and reassure my soul. I also need nature and just a sunrise can erase all manner of stress and worry from my world.

I live in Detroit and I always had the idea that I would live in a big city and still have nature (so important to me) nearby. The life plan was to end up in an east coast house on the ocean, a train ride from New York City.

Um… never happened.

Carmel outside of San Francisco was another dream. Uh… no.

Instead I fell for Indian Village and a 113 year-old house in the middle of Detroit.

I can see Belle Isle from my house and I often walk there, a HUGE island park full of wildlife and “the common man” and quite often they’re found jogging in short shorts.

And though “downtown” is only three minutes away I have pheasants, rabbits, possums, squirrels and all manner of bird life (a lifelong interest…Ms. B.D.), even Hummingbirds and an occasional Oriole will visit my trumpet vines. Sometimes in the winter I’ll see a stray deer and always the horses, ridden by policemen, that we run to give apples to.

AND enough stray cats and dogs to keep me busy for years.

On summer nights I open my doors to cool breezes and the sounds of the city.

Scooters, rap music and sirens.

I’ll often hit my front porch to watch the moon, follow the Chimney Swifts as they swirl and twitter or listen to the Nightjar’s call all blending with the music of the city.

Last night nature decided to pay a visit.

In the form of a bat…

The bats dig this neck of the woods, um hood, and I have spent countless nights poolside across the street watching them dip into the neighbor’s pool. And my neighbor, a large man, think linebacker, once also battled with a bat in a room in his house. He thought he could stun it with a tennis racket and then get it outside. The bat lost the war.

Dead with a single thwack…

My bat wasn’t in a small room however, but in the open part of my house that is the music room (also my office), parlor, and foyer. It would usually include the dining room too because the pocket doors were always open before it became Ms. 91’s suite.

This guy was flapping all over the place, dipping inches from my head and causing me to hit the dirt a number of times.

Slouchy, now Stumbly, but nonetheless makes a rare venture downstairs after hearing me shriek. He finds the whole thing hilarious. I ask him, using a not very pleasant voice, to help me wave the CRAZY thing outside and he laughs and says, “Bats are blind.”

Well I know for a fact that this isn’t true, but it gives me an idea. Maybe I could use a verbal cue to get the bat to figure out where “outside” was.

And I will now reveal what a total dork I really am.

I talk to the birds. It IS dorky, but more Zen, a beautiful connection to the world. Mock me if you will.

Particularly, I’m fond of Cardinals… “What cheer. What cheer. Pretty. Pretty Pretty.” We banter back and forth endlessly. So ‘round midnight, while the scooters are buzzing down Jefferson Ave. and cars are vibrating with Biggie Smalls, I’m on my porch whistling Cardinal songs.

And sure enough, out comes the bat.

Posted by M. Hannington at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yeah I know this column is entitled VIDEO Saturday, but sometimes audio is all you need.

"This American Life" is a radio show produced by Chicago Public Radio that is hosted by Ira Glass. It has been on air since 1995 and is now a free podcast available to anyone. "This American Life" had a brief stint on cable television, with a show of the same name on the Showtime Networks, but difficulties in scheduling and the long hours necessary to produce content for television caused it's creators to shut it down.

The show, originally called "Radio Playhouse", consists of acts that carry the same theme and are usually stories of everyday people, but it also sometimes covers major news events. It is the most popular podcast on the internet, has won numerous awards, launched the careers of essayists David Sedaris and David Rakoff and many episodes have been developed into films.

There has been a lot of talk around VG about "plans" lately and this is a favorite exploration of some plans and the people behind them, particularly delightful and moving is the story of Ron Mallet and his time machine. Spike Lee purchased this episode, entitled “My Brilliant Plan”, in 2008 with the idea of creating a film around physicist Ron Mallet's story. Mallet's tale begins halfway into the show, but the other stories are well worth the hour long listen.

To listen click here

To donate click here

In 1987 I left a long term relationship and struck out on my own. In truth, I've been on my own ever since. My life plan for art school and the art world became broadcast school and a job offer in post-production, which led to a career in what was at first animation and later filmmaking. I long ago framed the first animation cel I ever inked and painted...

I found it just the other day (as part of an ongoing "plan" to get organized) and looking at it I thought "Would I go back and change any of it?"

Probably not.

Posted by M. Hannington at 06:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

I remember his clean white shirts and how he dressed better than the other boys.

He had caramel skin, dark, dark hair and the most beautiful brown eyes. I remember staring into those eyes, so full of gold and the shimmer of life. There was an ethnicity about him, but I had not an idea what that was. I was young and those things didn’t occur to me. He could have been Indian, Italian or Arab.

It didn’t matter.

All the girls loved him.

He had an athletic body, strong, but still with enough baby fat to be cuddly. A brown teddy bear…

It was the dark mystery of him that those girls loved, the temptation of him, but for me it was different.

Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.

Mario Puzo - The Godfather

We talked in the hallways at school and found that we shared a love of books. It was an embarrassment to both of us. Not easily revealed to our friends, who would have found it nerdy, but I was already on my way to leaving the crowd of "normal" girls.

I had cut my hair like David Bowie and had taken up smoking. I was fourteen and to my friends this was a bad sign. I remember one of the girls crying when she found me stubbing out a Newport in the school’s bathroom, as if I had crossed to the dark side and was now somehow lost to her.

He and I understood the rebellion in our souls.

There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk "his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown children, can never be anything else.

Robert Heinlein – Stranger in a Strange Land

I remember the first day he invited me to his house. How the sun streamed in the windows. How warm and comfortable it felt.

His family was wealthy and they lived in a large house, full of tile and woodwork and it somehow melded into the landscape like my father’s Tennessee home on the cliff would in later years and it seemed a magical place to a young girl, who paid attention to environments and nature.

I was taking an architecture class and had my own dreams of a house on a cliff in New York (or was it Jersey?), near enough to the city, but close to nature and the ocean. A home I had designed for a fictional psychiatrist’s family and oddly, the study of the human mind would become a focus only four years later and maybe this is where it all started.

He lived by a waterfall that was watched over by a gazebo and strolling the grounds with him in the bright sunlight was one of those dreamy moments of youth. I still remember the sun that day and how white it seemed, how everything had a glow.

There was one time and only the one
When dust really took in the sun;
And from that one intake of fire
All creatures still warmly suspire.

Robert Burns – Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight

We held hands and we touched, we shared a meal prepared by a maid. Most of all we talked of the books we had read and the lives of other people we had explored in those books and how they took us away from the comfortable suburban lives that we lived.

We spent hours in his bedroom talking, touching each other, but more emotionally than physically.

Then only months later the news came.

Shot in the head.

The rebel in him had taken him on adventures I had never imagined. Not at fourteen.

He had robbed a gas station, a James Dean moment in the life of a fourteen year old and he was dead. A closed casket funeral and my first taste of death. I remember telling the mother and father, I had never met, how special their son was and trying to be a grown up in a fucked up world.

Father, I firmly do believe –
I know – for Death who comes for me
From regions of the blest afar,
Where there is nothing to deceive,
Hath left his iron gate ajar.
And rays of truth you cannot see
Are flashing thro' Eternity –
I do believe that Eblis hath
A snare in every human path –
Else how, when in the holy grove
I wandered of the idol, Love –
Who daily scents his snowy wings
With incense of burnt-offerings
From the most unpolluted things,
Whose pleasant bowers are yet so riven
Above with trellised rays from Heaven
No mote may shun--no tiniest fly –
The light'ning of his eagle eye –
How was it that Ambition crept,
Unseen, amid the revels there,
Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt
In the tangles of Love's very hair!

Tamerlane - Edgar Allan Poe

Posted by M. Hannington at 05:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

He really does love me.

Perhaps he loved me more than any man I’ve ever known.

At first, as a young girl, I just wanted boys to like me. If that meant playing spin the bottle or that wacky kissing game I came up with that used my Barnabus Collins game, then that was cool…it was fun.

The game had a spinning dial and the goal was to build a skeleton in a coffin. Land on an arm bone, that’s right, you get to kiss a girl’s arm, a skull her mouth. BUT land on a torso?

Whoo hoo the possibilities!

At least for anyone that was twelve.

Those early relationships in my teen years they were 50%, no probably more like 70% about sex. Some were even, if I’m to be honest, 100% about sex.

There were dates and boys too shy to do much more than carry out an attempt at making out. Boys that liked to talk and tried their hand at sharing feelings and those with smooth moves, but none of us really knew what we were doing back then.

Call it practice.

The girls I knew had rules. Dating older men… scandalous! Let someone go to thirds on a first date? Not cool. Doing it on the first date… major slut. First dates were supposed to be clean affairs with maybe a kiss goodnight at the door. You had to wait a least three dates before giving it up and ONLY after he has paid for dinner.

They were looking to avoid the guys that went after you with lightening speed. Trying to round the bases so that they could brag about it in the locker room.

Sex as a contest.

I was never very good at rules and some of my dates may NEVER have gotten a kiss and some may have gotten more than they planned on.

Sorry if I confused.

My prom date was a good friend and I always suspected that I was his first, but that was in the past. We rented a hotel room, but not with the intent to lose our virginity, or for me to spend the night with a man I was in love with, would perhaps someday marry… no, it was so we had a place to party on into the night.

We didn’t want that evening to have meaning; we wanted our senior year to go out in a blaze of glory, of champagne and Mary Jane.

I have had some men do some very "honorable" things for fear they would mess up my life or break a rule that would harm my standing in society, but in the end, who does THAT serve, but society.

Society = A tacit moral code.

More rules.

My best friends have always been men and this is not to degrade the ladies. I know some incredible babes. Professional women and mothers, who have kicked some ass and will always rule their world.

Rock on.

No one digs that shit more than I, but the simple fact is I have always gravitated towards male company and the reasons for that go deep.

I am more honest and trusting with my women friends than I used to be, but the “girls with rules” still pull at me. Those girls thought I should fit a specific mold… I was a non-conformist of whom Ms. 91 (she understands this) always says, “I don’t know how I got you.”

I have and had a variety of men friends. Some that were protectors, men that were FUN, or like devious older brothers always getting me in trouble, but somehow they always knew they could talk to me. About the mystery of women’s bodies, which they were just learning to understand. About sadness and hurt feelings and things that brought them joy… I’d watch them with other men and see a wall go up that they never had with me.

We love/loved each other because despite the fact that there ARE rules, when we are together there aren’t any.

There isn’t a game with a goal.

When I see the smile or emotion in those eyes, when I’m held tight… cherish me like I cherish you and we will never ever need rules my friend because we have our own.

And sometimes we will hurt each other and not be able to go past it and move on.

Come to me when you need me as I will come to you and leave me if you must, but don’t forget me 'cause I'm not looking for romance. Just a squeeze, a shoulder to lean on and to hear your heart when you say, "I love you."

And if you are REALLY lucky we may share a listen of a little Hendrix' guitar and let it go too far.

Does Cupid’s arrow ever strike and a love that lasts a lifetime ensue?

Nope. It’s much more complicated than that.

Posted by M. Hannington at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My Mother said if you can do something for somebody why not? That wrapped it up because I couldn’t find no philosophy and NO MORE BULLSHIT to say about that.

Gil Scott-Heron

A new Gil Scott Heron Album? Yeah that’s what I said too. The poet that so richly and righteously angrily railed about the cracks in the America of the early 70’s and 80’s has been in and out of prisons and drug rehab for the last 9 years, which has caused him to postpone upcoming books and recordings, but “I’m New Here”, his first album in 16 years, was released in February of this year and a book “The Last Holiday” is scheduled for release in January of 2011.

It is a different tone from the strong, shouting poet of the 80’s that I remember, but is rather a raspier voice with a tiredness that makes it more soulful and works well with the rhythms of his reflections of a life. For this album is not at all a look at where the world has come in all those years, but a view into the life of a lonely anguished man that reels you in with that voice and rhythm and makes you feel him so starkly. Often industrial and minimalistic these songs and spoken poems are poignant and achingly raw.

As someone who has been doing a lot of reflecting herself, this all too brief little album is going to haunt me for a long time.

Posted by M. Hannington at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

All day I have had the feeling that I’m outside of my body watching my life unfold.

My surroundings have become so surreal that I can’t believe I’m a part of them at all.

It’s terrifying!

I feel like shrieking.

I wonder if I’ll EVER have the life I want.

One full of passion, simplicity, creativity…

Peace = Bliss

Not now, so full of the hateful spider web of complexity.

Weaving and winding, ever tighter round my limbs.

I feel like a cat that wants to claw, scratch and hiss.

Get out of my way! Get out of my way!

I see madness scuffle by, rambling nonsense.

I’m so needed, TOO needed and yet I need.

But not like them… not hopelessly.

I can latch onto logic.

Carbon, nickel, cobalt, adamantine thiol, superparamagnetic, hard drive…

Others grasp and miss.

Steal lamps from hotel rooms.

Then call someone I love a thief.

Splatters on the floor that I must clean up…

It’s madness to whom I sacrifice, it feels cruel to succumb even for love, for decency.

DON’T CALL ME ATLAS!

The load on my back may be too much. I might crumble.

Oh god! Oh Buddha! Oh great Pan!

Open up the tunnel; let me see the light and travel far from the voices.

It’s me, it IS me and they should (can?) only be distant echoes in my life.

Fuck off you carbohydrates!

I can turn you to sugar!

I have the secret script, it may read a fairy’s tale, but it ends in reality – one of my choosing.

Posted by M. Hannington at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ignite

Rube Goldberg Machine by Syyn Labs for OK Go.

Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis, mourning the fact that there weren't that many geeks to hang out with in Seattle, started this series of geeky talks in 2006. These 5 minute Ignite presentations take place all around the world and are taped and shown on You Tube, think TED (see below) on a much smaller scale. To see Adam Sandowsky's Ignite presentation on the creation of the machine for the above OK Go music video go here. Adam Sandowski is the President of Syyn Labs and recently made his Ignite presentation in Los Angeles. This company that has come up with some unique inventions like the Cloud Mirror. Ignite, Syyn Labs and TED are all great examples of people using the internet to spread knowledge and ideas.

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year's TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.

Posted by M. Hannington at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

I don’t know if it was a trend unique to my city or if it was popular everywhere, but everyone I knew in Detroit had a Weber grill and we barbequed all summer. We cooked steaks, ribs, chicken, brats… roasted corn and potatoes. We still all do. BUT I don’t know anyone that has a Weber grill anymore.

I lost three of them. How they got the damn things over my six-foot fence I’ll never know, but they did it somehow. And in later years, as Slouchy NEVER emptied the ash until it was overflowing, I imagine it was a messy affair.

I had a friend who found his at a pawnshop down the street and convinced the owner that the intelligent thing to do was to let him take it back home.

After the third grill left the backyard at the Hannington compound I said, “Screw this!” I found a grill made by some artisan in his garage. A western type deal, it was welded steel with cast iron parts and had a little horseshoe that you could swing out over the fire and heat up a cup of coffee or some barbeque sauce and an overhead bar with various hooks that allowed you to hang pots of beans or other barbeque-like fare.

Not only did it look cool, but also there was NO WAY anyone was lifting that fucker over a fence!

I’ve lived in Detroit for over twenty years.

I’ve been a victim of crime.

Mostly, these “sprees” could be traced to a new crack house nearby. And I know a thing or two about crack. At some point in time the Columbian mules, who delivered kilos of cocaine hidden in shoes or the linings of luggage started teaching American dealers how to make crack cocaine, a much more highly addictive product.

Smart economics on the Columbian’s part…

OMG I just watched Jimmy Fallon get two women to see who could blow the hardest on either end of a tube with a pink ball inside. It might have been sexy except he had them wear huge bright-colored nose plugs.

Sorry got off track…

Like I said, I’ve lived here for a long time and have played in this city for even longer and I have never REALLY been in fear of my life. At some point you get streetwise, you know how to fit in and people just don’t mess with you.

When you live here you become a part of a neighborhood and for the most part if you dig on folks in the hood, they will dig on you and let you do your thing. On the east side, where I am, there is Berry Sub, Indian Village and West Village, to the north is Boston/Edison and Brush Park and to the west Cork Town and Mexican Town.

In the Cass Corridor, a bohemian stronghold, you used to be able to find a variety of women for sale - nubile sixteen year-old runaways, dwarves (who had a dwarf pimp) and even a hooker in a wheelchair (if you like that sort of thing). Up by the border of Detroit, by 8 Mile, you had the more traditional streetwalkers.

The gay hang was Menjo’s and the punk hang, right next door was Bookie’s.

There were card games in the back of Chung’s Chinese restaurant, the numbers racket in Greektown and Leo Derderian, who ran the Anchor Bar once had a bank of pay phones for the bookies who worked out of his bar AND the reporters from the nearby press houses.

My old haunt, Harmony Park had its down and out, mostly Vietnam vets, some who I employed and some that I fed, but they were never a threat rather they watched out for me.

It’s a city - it had and has all these things.

Anyway, I was talking about crack houses and the thing about crack is it’s cheap. It’s also extremely addictive and this drug caused a rash of crime we called the “smash and dash”. Someone would break a window rifle through the house to find something worth ten bucks and dash off.

I could always tell when there was a new crack house. On my walks I’d see the pints of empty over proof rum bottles scattered about, folks used rum to soak cotton wads wound onto a rod to light and heat their pipes with. I’d think, “Oh here we go again.”

It was really just a nuisance. It was more of a hassle to replace the broken window, but screw the boom box that went out the same window. I could and did live without it, no problem.

The fender guitar was never played, a gold Tiffany ring (that's a lot of crack), a collection of hot sauces?, money, cel phones, two coats, a purse, planters... One guy used to steal shrubs!

Oh no, not the shrubbery!

At one point I had the idea that if we just all taped envelopes to the door and easy to get to windows that said “Dear Crack Addict here is ten bucks.” The whole process would be simplified. It never really took though. Eventually the cops would bust the crack house and the smash-and-dashers would go someplace else.

Entering via a window, I have had carry out food stolen from my fridge. This was just after I had painted the kitchen and had the locks off the window. Surely some observant, out-of-work painter from nearby and who was maybe homeless, he had propped open the screen door, which alerted the neighbors who called in the early morning. All the champagne bottles - the variety of available booze went untouched - I owned were stacked on the back porch. Clearly he planned another pass. And he also made off with a silk skirt still in the box it came in. A burglar with distinctive taste… it was all very amusing, until I found a large hunting knife outside the window.

There were a number of car break-ins and more house break-ins. A burglar, who once stole Christmas presents from under my tree. It wasn’t until my 250lb neighbor tackled the suspect, who was seen jumping over my fence, that it was discovered it was a woman.

I wasn’t home at the time and had to go to the station afterwards to make a statement. She was blaming the crime on a boyfriend. The problem for her was there was one set of footprints, she was SEEN jumping my fence AND it turned out she was wearing one of the presents!

I’ll never forget the cop, who with an averted grimacing face held this jacket up with a pencil so I could ID it.

“Yup” I said, “It was meant for my assistant.”

I DO own a gun.

It is only a laser tag gun, though it looks real enough. I’ve thought that maybe I could deter a break-in with it, but what if it causes the perp to draw a REAL one? I’d be in deep doo-doo.

There IS a baseball bat in the corner of my old bedroom, but I have never had to use it.

I know self-defense and I would use it if threatened and have used well-placed elbows to remove drunken, unpleasant men from my presence and can report that a good head butt when approached from behind works well. These tactics were used to remove myself from a potentially harmful situation.

BUT as far as I can remember in my whole adult life I have only used violence in anger twice, once to protect another and then again to stop a stream of verbal abuse that had been ongoing for a long time.

I love life, the human body and I am endlessly fascinated by human beings.

I may talk a tough game, but I could never fire a bullet into another human with the potential of fatally wounding them.

And most of my crooks are just kids.

Posted by M. Hannington at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Truth In Advertising by Avion Films

This gem comes from my pal Henry Birdseye,who has been through the shit for me and managed to make it pleasant. I'm preserving it here at VagabondGuru.com as a reminder to all of what once was and what could still be. I remember Henry once editing a spot for me that required some difficult 3-D moves and which had a number of other technical barricades to leap, while my client sat and sketched out ideas on paper and wondered if the background should be more blue. Henry and I looked at each other knowingly, I sent the client off to kern type and we finished the damn spot. Henry pulled a nifty "Spark", think plug-in, out of his ass, tricked it into thinking it was still a free trial deal and we put that puppy to bed!

We did our fucking jobs, while many around us sought for reasons to exist. It was an odd time in my life and it would have been a living hell without Henry by my side.

Here's to the weird old days!

Please take the time to read his philosophy on life...

It begins... "The simplest personal belief I can put to you is just to be nice to people, be altruistic. We are all brothers and sisters on this planet, regardless of our coloring on the outside. If, for some reason you can't do this, eat some shit. Then die."

I heartily agree.

Posted by M. Hannington at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

Anyone that has worked on a film or a music video has attended a mandatory safety meeting. Most of us shuffle our feet and look bored – we’ve heard the speech before. Some Assistant Directors give better speeches than others and I heard one once that was particularly heartfelt and it did hold my attention, but it is not the norm. As someone who has worked as a director and a department head I am responsible for the safety of my crew and I DO take that seriously. However, my recent experience with the CSATF (Contract Services Administrative Trust Fund) that handles safety classes for IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) in LA has me questioning the use of initials and the validity of safety classes.

Some of the guys on the Detroit crews here go back generations to gritty grandfathers who were longshoreman or stagehands in Detroit''s numerous theatres. The man that served my studio's lighting package needs for decades had a grandfather who helped dynamite the stage wall of a theatre during a late 1800's protest over wages. This little stunt is one of the reasons that IATSE Local 38 was formed in Detroit and I imagine his grandfather would have either stormed out of the room hurling epithets or pulled out a pint of bourbon and a cigar had he been forced to listen to the advice proffered in the CSATF safety video.

Imagine my suggesting to one of these guys that they wear anti-slip appliqués on their shoes while in the production office. They'd think I was a lunatic!

Yet this is one of the "helpful" safety tips I was given.

In order to be placed on the industry experience roster (giving me hiring preferrence over non-roster members) of Local 800 in Los Angeles I am required to do a number of things, one of them being the attending of safety classes. I have argued with the union about this. Since being a member allows me to work anywhere in the country shouldn’t the union be a little less LA-centric and allow its members to take these classes someplace other than Los Angeles?

Answer: NO.

I have to plop down $1000 for a hotel and airfare to fly out to Los Angeles, rent a car to drive into Burbank to take this class and the required color eye test.

After shuffling back and forth from the Safety Class window to the Contract Services window, filling out forms, signing in and then having my picture taken I'm called for my eye test.

You can take a color eye test here. or test for deficiencies here. I scored a 0% deficiency on the latter. Typically these tests consist of a circle filled with colored dots that have within them a different colored set of dots that make up a number. The closer in tone or the more disrupted with other colors the harder the number is to distinguish. There are two problems that I see (no pun intended) with this requirement. One, if I couldn't distinguish colors I probably would have had a pretty hard time getting work as a designer in the first place. Two, the test I was given was SO basic that you’d have to have the worst color vision in the world NOT to be able to pick out the orange circles and squares amongst the green dots I was shown.

So at this point I’m starting to get pissed off.

Yeah, yeah I suppose it is important to weed out color blind Art Directors, but how many can there really be?

Next, I'm ushered into a room with walls full of safety harnesses and asked to watch a half hour safety video. The happy young woman explains to the three of us that we get to keep our books! Yay! That the test will be an open book test, that the video has the same information, but doesn’t follow the same order as the book and that in the future we will be paid $15.00 dollars an hour for any classes we take.

Whoop! I'm moving to Los Angeles where I can make $120/day taking classes!

WTF?

I just travelled 1,981 miles to Los Angeles to take an open book test? You couldn't have just mailed me the book and the test and let me mail it back? WHAT? I'm gonna somehow cheat?

Halfway through this useless piece of crap video I had out my checkbook and was paying the bills I hadn't gotten to before I left. This is the motion picture industry and I'm just down the street from mega-studios and the fucking safety video is fucking words on a fucking screen? Oh, they eventually threw in a few pictures. One of some knee pads, in case we didn't know what they looked like, and (are you kidding me?) some examples of sturdy shoes.

AND another of a bloody hand to reinforce the fact that if someone gets injured we should seek help!

This is safety for morons!

And the only time I actually crack a smile is when the video suggests you should surveil the office you are working in for any dangers. It reminds me of a certain employer, who to my delight, kept stumbling over the little step outside my office no matter how much safety tape and warning signs we put up.

And when they suggest we should consider putting anti-slip material on our shoes when working in an office environment?

I burst out laughing!

Okay, maybe this benefits the costume department folk that sometimes wear fashionable high heels on the job, but I'm all about sturdy shoes on a film job and it is either steel toed boots or a good running shoe for me and the same goes for most of my peeps.

The test is true or false and I crack the book once to make sure what PPE stands for (Personal Protection Equipment). IIPP is on the book's cover and it stands for Injury and Illness Protection Plan, which all the major studios have. I'm thinking someone added the word "Illness" at the last minute to make the initials more "copacetic".

So, I now have that important knowledge down pat and the next time I'm at Warner Bros. I’ll be sure to stop by and check theirs out!

The rest?

True or False: You should you twist and turn your body when lifting an object. Uh? Are you fucking kidding me?

It’s okay to cut up Asbestos on the job. Oh for crying out loud!

I get ONE answer wrong.

True or False: You need to bring your Safety Passport to the worksite. Note: this is a little 3 x 2" blue notebook with gold lettering and your picture in it just like a REAL passport. You get little gold stickers in it when you pass a course , which reminds me of the gold stars my piano teacher put in my notebook when I was EIGHT. I answer “True” (what would be the point of the stupid thing) and the answer is false… of course.

I spent $8000 dollars to join this union and pay a considerable amount of my paycheck to them every time I work a film and I dutifully pay my union dues.

This is complete bullshit!

I know CPR, I know the Heimlich maneuver, I once put a piece of an employee's thumb on ice, wrapped and elevated his hand and had him rushed to emergency. And you guys are completely wasting my time by telling me that I need to ask for help when carrying an object that totally blocks my fucking vision!

Training is good! Worker SAFETY is a great thing. This kind of nonsense is bureaucratic crap.

In ten or twenty years I plan on jumping off a cliff. In this way I won't be a burden to society when I no longer have the energy to work. I'm not suggesting that other useless people follow my path just consider it will you? In the meantime, I'll impart my knowledge to my brothers and sisters in IATSE Local 38 and other unions nationwide and teach them things like the importance of sturdy shoes. For everyone in Hollywood this will come courtesy of the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers), who run CSATTF (Contract Services Administration Training Trust Fund) and CSATF (Contract Services Administration Trust Fund).

It IS always the damn Producer's fault!

BTW, they do reimburse training expenses over at CSATF, but despite my numerous complaints about time and expenses not a soul there mentioned this. You can find this important knowledge on their website under "Other Information". Oh, and you have to request a reimbursement in advance. So it would be cool if one of the nice folk that work there would maybe have TOLD you that. I'll be back and I'm bringing my PPE!

Posted by M. Hannington at 07:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Playing the Building by David Byrne

In 2008 David Byrne transformed the NYC Battery Maritime building into a musical instrument that could be played on an organ. The building, which had been closed since 1938, was open to the public where anyone could come in and have a chance to play. Even Mayor Bloomberg gave it a whirl.

Wires were run from the organ that tripped motors that vibrated against glass or fired hoses which pumped air into the building's pipes. Hammers struck the columns at various heights to produce different pitches and timbres.

Music, too, is becoming ubiquitous, and that fact provided some of the impetus to Mr. Byrne's sonic installations. He said that he wanted people to become more sensitive to the sounds around them and to change their relationship to music. "I don't want the public to be passive consumers of culture; you have to participate [at the building] to make sounds."

The other issue is authorship. Mr. Byrne is adamant that it's not his music that is being heard at the Battery Maritime Museum. "The person who plays the organ is the author of the music. I am not the author of what they play any more than Les Paul is the author of a million guitar solos."

- Wall Street Journal

Byrne has done a similar project in the UK and also an installation of 100 guitar pedals which produced a variety of sound when gallery goers walked over them.

David Byrne Art Projects

Posted by M. Hannington at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

Cement sprawl scarred by mega highways.

Mountains loom up.

Loom by.

Moving, scraping.

Suddenly dropping to foothills, I fall.

Flat valley.

Dwelling scattered.

Like strewn wreckage.

Rows of workers harvest the fields.

The smell of sea air…

Crashing ocean waves…

Let freedom reign.

I smile and scream BODY SURFING!.

Horses…

Curly bare oaks.

CYPRESS TREES!

A truckload of hay is spraying its load.

Green, green, green.

Spanish moss.

Oh, the colors.

America, this country! Beautiful.

Too fast.

So high.

The mountains move.

Opening up just for me to see.

Tears.

Such joy!

I wish you were here.

This highway is forever and ever.

Posted by M. Hannington at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

It’s that moment when the plane starts to descend… a plunge. When the ground comes at you fast. I always think, I’m going end up as splatter or I’ll walk off this plane and into a sea of humanity.

When I’m someplace new or someplace I haven’t been in a long time…

Sometimes it’s the change of scenery...

Sometimes it is the feeling I always get on that landing plane.

I'm really living, I have survived.

Isn’t life grand? Aren’t the stars the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen?

The little boy says “ Look there is a T in the sky!” and two crossing trails of white have indeed made a T.

How cool.

The valet driver likes the sound of my name. “Ms. Hannington?” It rolls off his tongue with an Hispanic lilt, “Okay, Ms. Hannington, let’s get the bags in for you.”

“I’m Luis and if you need anything Ms Hannington, you just ask for me.”

It’s a short elevator ride, but he holds the door open for me while we chat. He knows where I live and what it is like and I know what he enjoys doing. I know he has a friend in Ann Arbor and he’d like to visit. He now knows my name is Mary, but he says “Okay, see you Ms. Hannington”

It makes me smile and he smiles too... a flash of shared joy.

My friend’s child asks me “Mary? How do you know my dad?”

The simple answer is “We worked together.”

Instead I say, “We once went into battle together.”

It’s the truer answer.

And I know that there are people in the world that wouldn’t let me drown. Human beings that are watching out for me…

Tiny dots in a sea…

Today I'll cross ground I've crossed before. Where loved one's and stranger's footsteps have tread. Some of them I'll never see again. Some of them I have yet to meet.

Life is a battle and if you plunge into it with all your heart and all your strength you'll always win. The prize may not be what you are looking for, you may often lose the ground gained, but I've got your backs and I know you have mine.

And oh, aren't the stars beautiful?

What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!"

- H. P. Lovecraft

This was written on a business trip to LA that reminded to stop and look, to open up instead of shut down. There I visited with an old, old friend, whom I haven't known very long, cinematographer Colin Watkinson and a little brother I didn't know I had, Taage Storey... thanks for being one of my dots.

Posted by M. Hannington at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

Hospitals can be the source of a million tales and a doctor, who has been in the family for a long time, has fond memories of working the emergency shift in Detroit. She once removed, among other things too numerous to mention, a Prell bottle with a golf ball glued to it from up someone’s ass.

A nine for creativity...

Then there was the woman, who after an emergency C-section decided to name her baby Placenta because she thought it was a beautiful name.

Multiple tries from multiple Docs could not persuade her otherwise… somewhere in the world there is a woman named Placenta, but perhaps she has changed it by now.

These days everything in a hospital has a beeping alarm and I mean EVERYTHING. The bed, the chair… the last time I was here I sat in a chair and then couldn’t get out of it without causing an ear piercing bleep. Praise Buddha the nurse tech finally came in and allowed my escape from the chair of evil. The heart monitor beeps when it runs out of paper, or toner, or if one of the leads comes loose, any malfunction at all… BEEP BEEP. I watched three people go over the thing trying to figure out exactly which malfunction it is.

Desperate to squelsh the beep...

Ms. 91’s hands are always cold and this makes the blood oxygen reader beep, but these are just tiny little beeps – Wes the hot young tech is clearly frustrated - I offer to bring in some gloves.

I ask him if he gets used to the beeps.

“Arrgh!” he says “I hear them when I go home.”

The donging nurse calls are the worst he hears those in his sleep.

Then there is that damn IV drip beep, a loud two-beep deal that just drives you totally nuts. I was there for only four hours and I was ready to crawl into a corner and moan, "Make it stop... PLEASE make it stop." I watched Laurie the head nurse do a U-turn and come back into the room. Ms. 91 says defensively “I didn’t DO anything!”

Somewhere along the line the beeps have become accusatory.

Ms. 91 had been diligently holding her arm out straight because to bend it means beeps.

I tell the Doc she hates it when I have to change her or help her on the toilet. She’ll slap my hand away and say “Let me do it!” when she knows she needs help and I have to pretend like I'm not helping.

But when Wes comes in and wants to hold her up and yank down her drawers she’s perfectly happy about it.

He says “You haven’t seen Wes!” and I say, “Oh yes I have.”

With her it’s always open mike night and she has them rolling in the hospital corridors.

The doc called the other night and said, “I just walked into your mom’s room. She’s sitting on the pot talking on the phone to her sister and they’re trying to monitor her heart and it’s racing… Oh now, she’s smiling and waving at me.”

He says he’s not sure if the racing is because Wes just left and it’s like a party in her room or it’s A -Fib.

Today he asks her if she’s happy (He knows her “Why should I live any longer? I’m no good to anybody.” speech.) She says, “Okay I’ll live if I can walk.” He says, "Okay you can be sad until we get you walking."

He gets it.

Sometimes it sucks to be old, but we are NOT adding happy pills to the mix.

Doc looks in her the eyes and says "Okay beautiful."

91 just says, "Och!" and then shoves him for good measure.

She has now settled into a rehab center for a few weeks, one I pass on my morning walk everyday, a place where the Y ladies will visit and Judy will visit and her daughter will most certainly swing by.

Her doctors will visit too not just because they’re doctors, but because they love Ms. 91 too.

Posted by M. Hannington at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

This is an old piece. That its meanderings apply to similar events in my life that took place exactly a year from when it was written amazes me. That the lessons in the dream still apply... I republish it here at VagabondGuru.com because that is where it belongs.


I dream in color.

I used to write down my dreams.

I used to try and control my dreams.

I once did control my dreams…

I don’t try anymore.

The other night I had a vivid dream. The planet Earth was overpopulated. Young tyrants had taken control believing they could make the overcrowded world a better place. They began by banishing the experienced, the wise and their animals to a distant planet. (This last bit I’m sure has to do with the fact that I recently concluded that any obsession with cyber-pets is stupid, it's impossible to really love them.)



I had just finished watching “Scream Bloody Murder” about the genocide in Rwanda and Darfur. The terrible scenes of what hatred had wrought. The dead, the mutilated and the raped… Then the man who was forgiven by a woman whose family he had killed.

The unspeakable horror of these events was itself like a dream.



It made the subject of my own dream understandable. This and at that time I had just met my own young and quite evil tyrant.

As a warrior in the world, Castaneda’s character, Don Juan would say that we must use the attributes of control, discipline, forbearance and timing to defeat the tyrant. Warriors, he teaches, never take themselves seriously. Tyrants take themselves deadly serious thereby distorting their view of reality. Tyrants like Ahmad Muhammad Harun in Sudan and Bagosora in Rwanda are difficult to defeat because they force their realities on entire populations. My tyrant has a similar sense of reality. A reality in which control or power is earned by rights of a perceived superiority.



Don Juan’s theories (fictional as they are) seem to keep cropping up in my life and they jibe with my love of eastern philosophies. He puts his tyrants into three classes. Petty tyrants, who inspire terror and are physically and emotionally abusive, little petty tyrants, who may deliberately cause problems, but do little real harm and the last, teensy-weensy petty tyrants, who are just plain irritating. He says it is the lucky warrior who stumbles across a “pinches tironos” because one can only expose this person, and so win, by losing one’s self-importance thus taking the higher ground. How can you be humiliated if you don't take yourself seriously? In doing so you move further down the path of “seeing”.

That’s of course if you survive!

Zen teaching goes one step further “What is a bad man, but a good man’s job”.



My tyrants show up when I’m at my best. I had spent a month putting together an art department on a small film – a labor of love, but heavy on the labor side. We did amazing things with the little we had. We worked sixteen, sometimes eighteen hours a day. The whole crew had become a family, but one of my own was already plotting against us. I saw it coming - we had only two days left to go.

It was bad.

The tyrant wormed her way onto the set, took advantage of a young affable director and treated all that were about her like peons, tossing out insults like candy wrappers. She became a one-man band who thought she could replace a whole department, it didn't work.

She would later find herself blocked from furthering her career.

Why? I let her be herself and advised others to do the same.

Hatha yoga teaches me that you must move beyond the self to become enlightened. A kind of “Let go, let God.” When you do this bullies and tyrants don't matter and are easily defeated.

I have had many “tiranos or tironitos” cross my path. Most have failed to harm me, but they don’t like me very much. One, a first rate pinches tiranos, almost destroyed a marriage, contributed to the death of her own mother and my friend. Not finished yet, she stole the woman's ashes and had her secretly buried. She destroyed herself by destroying her own reality and no longer has any sense of power. The tyrant on the film set, having lost one fight had moved on to wage a second and a third and years later has lost the fight.



I dreamed I was in the future. I had a petty tyrant in this dream, I have one now. A woman. Women are far crueler enemies to fight than men.

In my dream millions were preparing to leave. I was packing clothes and the things I would need; It appeared I was leaving too. You see, the woman in my dream (the tyrant) had explained that I could stay, but my dogs would be confiscated. There was no food for them in the new world they were creating. She knew this was the one thing that would make me leave and I was in her way.

I had asked her for some shoes. I had none to take and when she arrived with them, the shoes were a size nine. “Oh look!” she said, “They must have made a mistake, these aren’t 7 ½!” The shoes fit her perfectly. In my dream this woman was cruel, like my current nemesis, she delights in digging in the knife.

Everything about the woman in the dream was cold and mechanical. She whisked us away on an industrial steel flying skateboard. It looked like this…



Okay, so sometimes I still sketch the stuff in my dreams…

The woman explained that we would be transported off the planet in large black mattresses. These were not comfy Serta mattresses with their fake brocade patterns, but forbidding things, huge and made of stiff rubber. These were the only things that were known to aid survival on the trip and it was hoped that inside them so would we. In the dream I was playing along, knowing somehow that I would get through. That the woman thinking she had won would become so drunk with power she would go too far as my real tyrant had done.



You might call my dream a nightmare, but it ended with a vision of an earth populated with animals. All the animals I knew were there, my animals were there and I awoke with a broad smile. A world of cyber-pets defeated!

As I get closer to my dreams for life and I have been working diligently on them. I have realized that you are rarely handed anything for free. You must work hard for it. Not by cutting down others in your path like the petty tyrant, but by being the best you can be. Never by working alone or strong-arming others to follow you, but by having patience in bringing others to where you are in your knowledge. By admitting your own weaknesses and seeking out others whose skills complement yours. Insulting those that work with you or building an environment of fear only gets you sheep.

And never ever should anyone let a tyrant win.

Posted by M. Hannington at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

He said, “I think we should have sex.”

I was there to get my hair done and sex wasn’t really on my mind.

His hands would explore and I’d flick them away.

He was working hard on the elaborate Flock of Seagulls slash my own wacky vision of a hairdo using razors and scissors. This was after running me through a perming process that had my hair all curling to the west (at least if I was facing north that is).

Hair was important to me then and to him too.

Maybe that is why he was aroused, I don’t know...

I had sworn off relationships at the time. I had fallen in love hard and he had set me free. I thought that maybe that was a decision we both should have made, but he made it clear I had little say.

Yes, it was a complicated relationship, but I wasn’t a quitter or someone that believed that age, race or economics should make a difference.

So, I was angry with men.

For years I refused committed relationships with them. In a convoluted way I became a woman, who bucked the trend or what Dr. Phil and so many others would later label us as... beings that needed to be emotionally attached to their lovers.

I wasn’t really.

Attracted, interested, but not needy…

I was sexually open to everything and I mean EVERYTHING. Been on the bottom been on the top with Carol and Ted and Alice. Had a hunky hockey player, who wanted an exclusive relationship and thwack he's iced. He needed me, but I didn’t need him.

It wasn’t all about sex.

I dated lots of men that I never slept with… friends really.

One a male model, who loved to make out with me and looked great on my arm. Only he had no interest in women whatsoever - other than apparently kissing me - and was an out gay man.

Another, like me, a fan of gore and bad porn movies… just someone to see “Brain Damaged” or “Debbie Does Dallas” with.

The men I REALLY loved all ended up wanting different things and it was years before I trusted them or ever thought I needed them at all.

The hair guy was different; we had been out together, but never in connection with the other. Never an attraction there or the blooming of a better friendship… just common friends and hair.

We were alone and he kept trying to seduce me, but with one glass of wine and the aforementioned lack of interest – nothing. Sitting there with conditioner soaking into my hair he nibbles my neck and I say, “Stop!”

Over and over and over… he’d come in for the kill and I’d shove him away. He was persistent and when my hair was dried and done he pressed into me again.

I got pissed “I don’t want to fuck you!” I screamed.

Now all woman, don’t lie you do, have some kind of rape fantasies. Being thrown up against an alley wall by a handsome stranger and being ravished in his strong arms, helpless to do anything about it but give in?

This was NOT that.

I layed down on a bench, flipped up my skirt, I was angry. “You want to screw a woman who doesn’t want to screw you?” I asked, “Go ahead!”

And he did.

Posted by M. Hannington at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Directed by Max Joseph & Chris Weller, based on an article by Graeme Wood, adapted by Chris Weller and Max Joseph.

One of the more interesting selections at Sundance this year. I would argue that it was meant to stir the pot of anti capital punishment sentiment, but it is a unique look at a solution to a medical need and Weller's animation brings a needed humor to what might have been a more morbid piece.

Programmer's Notes: GOOD, a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward has joined filmmaker Max Joseph, animator Chris Weller, and writer Graeme Wood to create this entertaining video provocation based upon Wood's original article, which can be found on the GOOD website (http://www.good.is/). Wood describes his article's intent to address the disparity between the moral hand-wringing we apply to the inmate-organ-donation question, compared to the lack of much discussion at all of the capital punishment issue itself. We quibble over whether a man has a right (!) to donate (!) his liver, but we are silent about the fact that the reason he is in a position to donate his liver is because he is soon to be a literal victim of human sacrifice by the state. Surely we can find the energy to consider both moral problems.

Posted by M. Hannington at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence, the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at a great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world with out me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”

Alice Sebold – The Lovely Bones

Guru tends to obsess about being middle-aged; he talks about it all the time. You know the bald spot, the belly and to be fair I’m the one that added double chin into the mix, but we ALL get them. This stuff is all surface; it’s the lingerie that’s under the clothes that makes you feel beautiful. Still, he has the most wonderful way of reminding me that I’m not just old too, but OLDER.

Closer to death.

He says, “When were you born?”

1960

“You’re going to be fifty this year.”

That’s right I’ll be turning fifty this summer. Yup the big 5-0.

It is a number… another label. I won’t celebrate it.

I don’t celebrate birthdays. It has nothing to do with getting older; I just think it’s dumb. Pony rides and clowns and cakes are all great fun when you are a kid, but adult birthdays especially mine don’t work in this household.

I’m the only one who knows how or is capable of baking a cake. And forget the surprise, I'm too perceptive for those.

Ms. 91’s life and age are celebrated every day. And that is how it should be.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure I’ll think about what it has meant to be around for five decades, but I think about that stuff now. Now more than ever I want to be truly happy, more at peace and I have somehow managed to fathom that I’m the ONLY one that can do that.

Duh!

Now more than ever I want to make an impact on the world.

Even if it is in small ways…

I just exchanged cards with the COO of Bridgewater Interiors, an automotive supplier in Detroit that is innovative and has long ago diversified. They have branched out into areas other than automotive and are one of the companies here that are HIRING workers. His kid is going to U of M to study advertising and I said have him call me.

I have worked with advertising agencies for over 15 years, maybe I can help.

That OLD thing again…

Almost exactly a year older than our young President. I have been around the block, done a lot of things, some stupid, some smart, but I have learned and grown. I feel both young and old, on the verge of new things, but wiser in the pursuit of them.

If I can touch this one young person, whose father was once a poor boy from Ghana, Africa, then I have touched the world. His father, Barima (one of those musical African names) is a man with one foot in the third world and one foot firmly on American soil.

We talk about poverty and he reminds me of a story from the Bible. “You can give ten people in a room the same amount of money, some will drink it away and others will buy bars to serve the drinkers and still others will do something altogether different,” he says.

That is human nature…

I want to be one of the ones that does something different.

Like Suzie Salmon in “The Lovely Bone”s I want to have that first kiss that is better than any other kiss and unlike her I want hold the world with me in it. For as long as I can I want to live and love and do those things that make me happy – to create, to share beauty and to help others to find it – I want to live life to the fullest now more than ever.

“At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.”

Alice Sebold – The Lovely Bones

I have one pack of cigarettes left over from a carton of cigarettes that cost me almost a hundred dollars in New York City (200 little sticks of death) and when I finish that pack it will be my last. I know that they are a self-destructive habit. After a five hour session with Dunaway on this last film I remember sucking one down in almost a single breath.

So hard it is sometimes to deal with this life we turn to those things that destroy it.

Seeking our own murders as Hamlet asks for the cup.

Posted by M. Hannington at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Brian Mallow at Wonderfest

Brian Mallow has made appearances on CBS, A&E, TechTV, and the Discovery Channel teaching his brand of science through comedy. He spoke about science and viruses this year at Wonderfest.

Wonderfest, the Bay Area Festival of Science, is held each year in the beginning of November. Created by Tucker Hiatt it is a non-profit educational project that features exhibitions and presentations by world-class scientists, with debates and Q & A sessions with the audience.

Mission Statement: Through public discourse about provocative scientific questions, Wonderfest aspires to stimulate curiosity, promote careful reasoning, challenge unexamined beliefs, and encourage life-long learning. Wonderfest achieves these ends by presenting series of scientific events to the general public. At most of these events, pairs of articulate and accomplished researchers discuss and debate compelling questions at the edge of scientific understanding.

To donate to this organization click here.

Posted by M. Hannington at 08:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

"Hey Mr. Comedian! Come here! We are Christians and we didn't like what you said!"

"Then forgive me."

Bill Hicks - Arizona Bay

I have been struggling with a phrase from the Tao te Ching "What is a good man, but a bad man's teacher. What is a bad man, but a good man's job." It is a phrase that has governed my life. It is a bit of ancient wisdom that reminds us to take the high road, to not stoop to their level and most importantly to find the good in all things.

Even Fundamentalist Christians? Yikes!

Unlike Cat (the Property Master that walked away from the film) thought, I am not suffering shell shock from this recent film project. Anger, shouting and insults don’t affect me in the least. I can listen to a barrage and just sit there thinking in my back brain that I’m glad I’m not this person and in the foreground be framing my answer to what is usually a spewing of illogical ideas and paranoia combined.

It's just a Zen thing.

Seeing the pain Faye's anger causes on other's faces THAT is hard and it drags on me. Continually watching someone try to force their will on others? Logical or otherwise? Those that are trying SO hard to please? It exhausts me. It hurts my soul. My own anger turns inward (guilt that I couldn't stop it) and outward (I want to be left alone, to process my feelings and to find some peace) to be away from too much pain. Hers too.

Impossible.

The countless interruptions of an already chaotic life? That wears too.

And really I don’t have much of a life anyway and when you come off of an 18 hour a day, burner of a film and have a weekend off it would be nice if Herr Direktor would let you RELAX, but that is not the Dunaway way. The crew is on hiatus, but this film IS Faye's life.

The constant flow of text, email and phone calls from her often feel like being pecked at by a bird of prey. She wants this so badly.

I just want to do some laundry.

My life is a long string of constant interruptions already, everyone needs attention and I’m the Mommy.

Slouchy wants to know if I saw the Whistling Puppy video he sent a link to. Last week, it was some old guy with missing teeth, who was miming conducting to music. Nice of you to share your new interests honey, but no thank you. I'm sure this stuff comes second hand from the foodie girlfriend.

Egad! Where does he find these female companions? Toys R Us?

Faye manages to stretch the extra chaos ALL the way up to Christmas week. And this is the time of year that Ms. 91 is in all her glory, which alternatively drives me nuts and makes me smile.

You see, Ms. 91 hates Christmas, tossed her address list for cards away, and once Dad retired never decorated her house. I would forage in the woods for fresh evergreens and berries to create a last minute centerpiece for the table at our Christmas dinners and that was as festive as it got.

And I think secretly Ms. 91 dug it.

Because every year it happens... every time she gets a Christmas card she beams. She spends her days walking from her room to my desk to show me a photo or read me a letter. And the next thing you know she is asking, “Mary? Do you have any leftover Christmas cards?” and “Mary? Can you read this address because I can’t tell what I wrote here.” "Can you call your brother? He is coming out to dinner right?"

There is a distinct difference in tone between Faye's almost indistinguishable drawl when she pronounces my name and Ms. 91's familiar ring. The one stiffens me up and the other breaks me down and can give me such joy.

Two lunches and a dinner have 91 scrambling to pick out clothes and bragging on the phone about how busy she is.

There's Christmas lunch at Vincente’s Cuban place on Friday with the Y ladies. Bonus, the yummy Tai Chi instructor shows up. Alas, he is just a pup and far too young for me, but ANY attention these days is nice.

Sunday lunch at Muse, which serves up Oprah’s favorite grilled cheese sandwich and hence is now always swamped, but the food is good and reasonably priced. This one is with the Church Lady, who I don’t see much anymore and it is particularly painful for me.

She'll never have what she wants so badly and this time the manipulation is so over the top that I'm angry. Not that I show it, I'm perfectly polite. In the end, I have to forgive her because she didn't live my life and will NEVER understand. And mostly, the anger subsides because Ms. 91 having eaten FOUR waffles stuffed with pears and mascarpone and drenched with syrup is now eyeing my bowl of yogurt with fresh berries and in the end I HAVE to sacrifice my enjoyment and slide it over to her to finish.

Oscar Wilde said, “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

I have never been able to do this (live as someone wishes me to live) and over the years this has caused pain to those that I have loved. Ms. 91 included. You HAVE to always be yourself. What else can you be. When those around you start to prevent you from being yourself? It is time to walk away.

To continually try to force someone to change is such a colossal waste of time. To continually try and help someone who won't help themselves is an impossible situation. You either accept things as they are and grow together or you part ways. And maybe I'm wrong, about this Christmas, maybe the Church Lady has finally realized this, that I won't ever fit into the mould she has made.

We have to love each other for who we are and every once and a while it helps to give away a bowl of berries... just because.

Posted by M. Hannington at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By M. Hannington

Ah yes, the panty wars...

There was a time not long ago when a boy and his dog could set out in search of tail and things were simple. All it took was a look, a mere glance and BLAMMO a hot romp in the sheets ensued. But now (when wealthy athletes with mistresses bring shouts of "horror!") it takes concise planning and strategy and of course...

The correct choice of man panties.

Posted by M. Hannington at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear... I don't believe anybody since Goya could put so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression. And before Goya you have to go back to the medieval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimeras on Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel. They believed all sorts of things -- and maybe they saw all sorts of things too...

- Pickman's Model, H.P. Lovecraft, 1926.

I haven’t done much creating and I feel like I want to go back to painting again, but I don’t know where to start.

What I have been writing of late feels more like destruction than creation and sometimes you have to step back to see real truths.

I don’t like myself much right now.

A hard-shelled creature laughing in the face of madness…

I’m meant, I hope, to be of a softer shell, but the creative process sometimes takes one to an abyss. Self-preservation must bring you back or you don’t survive, but that insulation doesn’t allow the necessary myriad of ideas to flow.

A catch 22, but sometimes to open up even a crack is to explore too much.

Goya is a favorite painter of mine and he described the creative process in the above etching as something altogether maddening.

“The sleep of reason produces monsters.”

These etchings were a series known as Los Caprichos done during the French Revolution when Goya was studying not only that movement, but the ludicrous behavior of man and his superstitions.

Irrationality.

Goya, born in 1746, worked hard at being the best at his craft. Because of the times he had to rely on royalty and the wealthy to supply his paint. It was the lead in this paint that is believed to have caused him to finally slip into that abyss and not come back.

What I admire Goya for most is not his macabre black paintings, though I once did an homage to them, but his paintings of the royalty that were his patrons.

He married the court painter Francisco Bayeu’s sister and Bayeu’s entrance into the Royal Academy of Fine Art are what helped land Goya his first job. That of designing tapestries to cover the cold and bare stone walls of palaces. These tapestries usually depicted a life of leisure – banquets, hunts and entertainment.

Thus he kept the aristocracy warm.

He later painted their portraits with anything but warmth.

He was the court painter for Charles III, Charles IV and later, though his painting The Third of May clearly shows his disgust with the war, the conquering French monarchy.

It was a time of enlightenment in Spain that ended with the reign of Ferdinand VII in 1814 and the Spanish Inquisition.

Though Goya painted his wealthy friends and intellectuals with some emotion. The faces of the family of Charles IV in the above portrait appear vacuous. The splendor of their clothes and jewelry is minute in detail, but set in the artist's studio where he paints from behind. It’s as if Goya is presenting them to us from his point of view.

All pomp and luxury, but not much else there.

His" The Nude Maja" shocked Spanish society, but rather than cover her he did a second painting of her clothed. Both paintings were confiscated during the Spanish Inquisition.

Just before descending into madness and covering his walls with the black paintings, he completed a series of horrifying paintings on tin, one of which depicts the ill treatment of the insane, who at the time were kept untreated in prisons. Perhaps he knew where he was heading?

He died in exile in France.

Despite the times he lived in he enjoyed a freedom to be that I have not felt in some time.

He said what he wanted to say in his art despite what went on around him.

That he ended up painting dead babies, mutated humans, witches and skulls… scenes of madness and horror. That he did this alone on the walls of his villa is something I understand.

He saw all sorts of things too.

Posted by M. Hannington at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been on a film for 2 months and not just any film, an emotion filled roller coaster of a film with Faye Dunaway. I haven't had a day off... I 've gone from Production Designer to Assistant Director to Editorial Supervisor and that was just last week.

I know, I know. Today is a day to be thankful.

I'd be thankful to be alone on a desert island!

A real bed would be nice too!

But first I have to finish off a room to put it in. When?

The truth is Faye is a whirling dirvish that wraps a string around me like a top and has me whirling too. I'm fayeweary (a new word!) and I just want to sit and stare, maybe read, something other than a movie script.

I WANT peace.

I'm certainly not cooking one of my Thanksgiving dinners.

That's something that starts at 6:00am with herbed butter that gets spread under the skin of the Turkey. Half baking sweet potatoes so they can be sliced and covered with brown sugar and dots of butter and baked, cutting the tips off of green beans that will later be cooked with almonds and a dollop of butter, soaking red skin potatoes in water to later boil with garlic gloves and be half-mashed with cream, chopping celery, mushrooms, onions and sometimes oysters for the stuffing that ALWAYS goes in the Bird, tossing a salad with fresh greens, grape tomatoes, dried cherries, pine nuts, chard from the garden (if it hasn't froze), cucumber, red onion, but not black olives those go on the relish tray with the tiny pickles and later there would be homemade gravy with giblets, maybe sourdough rolls and of course pumpkin pie.

Oh no, I ain't doing that.

Lucky me, the Church Lady is staying put this year and insists that we come to her place.

We're supposed to be there at 1:30pm so as per usual Slouchy hits the shower at 1:26pm and it's a 40 minute drive.

He insists the dog goes, but the car is filled with boxes of props, a garbage can lid, a half a dozen bottles of vitamin water and old newspaper that is a much smaller version of a pile that I have been slowly whittling down.

The dog sits with the garbage can lid at his feet behind Ms. 91 and I ride behind the Slouchmeister, who immediately smashes the seat into my knees.

We arrive only fifteen minutes late. This is because the Church Lady thinks I'm always late and I admit that I sometimes take advantage of the fact that there is not a snowballs chance in hell that Slouch will be on time to anything and where there are sans Slouchy events I'm a pretty prompt person, but to compensate for my "lateness" she ALWAYS schedules us early.

This business has caused me to wait a half hour to an hour at restaurants, where the Church Lady assuming I won't be there on time purposely comes late.

I ask for red wine and I NEED a glass of wine a BIG glass of wine.

I leave the side of said wine for a mere ten seconds and it happens, Alvin comes darting through and his big happy tail sends the glass careening onto the light gray carpet. My instincts say grab some paper towel and blot it up as best I can and then get out the soap and a rag.

From her perch on the couch the Church Lady stops my blotting and says, "No. No. Go grab the salt." "Now sprinkle it all over the spill."

I'm not sure what this is supposed to do exactly, but there are now handfuls of pink salt all over the carpet. We wait. The salt is sorta raked away leaving the same red wine stain, but now soda water is added to the mix. We wait again and then she instructs me to place one of her good cream colored towels over the stain and stomp on it.

Luckily I'm wearing my steel-toed boots so stomping is a relatively easy thing to do!

When we are through stomping I now have three wine stained towels to put in the wash.

A half an hour has gone by and I'm worried that the stain is going to set because the salting, the soda and the stomping have done absolutely nothing. I almost say "For christ sakes don't you have any fucking carpet cleaner?", but I realize that this is not the right audience. Finally, she agrees to let us search for the appropriate cleaning product and back comes Slouchy with some Resolve.

This is after he has stood around in his new jeans bought by MY personal shopper with the size tag still on the back and has gotten an evil stare from me that he knows means he better fucking do something NOW!

I've used Resolve before and I know it will do the trick, but Church Lady isn't done. I think you should put some more in the middle of the stain. "But it needs to sit and it will soon foam up." I stutter.

The result of all this nonsense is that I'm now carting six inch high bits of foam back and forth from the carpet to the sink multiple times, the stain is gone, but not the soap. And my hands are now shiny clean.

It's no secret that Church Lady is not a chef.

Reportedly the Turkey was good, but since I'm not eating meat... The stuffing from a box, the potatoes another box, the gravy a jar and the vegetables were formerly in bags in the freezer, and the cranberry sauce still has markings on it from the can it was in. No salad.

I'm not complaining, screw the healthy diet, no need to cook right?

After dinner Slouchy immediately or perhaps conveniently falls asleep, so I help clear plates and help with dishes and then we sit around. I can't stand it I have too much adrenaline and I go back to removing the soap from the carpet. And after the tenth trip I feel that pinch in my back that says "Stop moving now or you're going to have sciatic pain for 2 weeks."

I stop.

I'm sitting up straight and the Church Lady comes and sits next to me. She says, "Mary, I have done a terrible thing." and I'm so tired and hallucinating from all the preservatives in the food from boxes that the first thing that comes to my mind is "Oh my god she's somehow killed my dog!"

Turns out she has forgotten to load a plate for a neighbor and we have eaten all the potatoes and stuffing. I say, "Don't worry you have the half frozen broccoli we didn't eat and the carrots, plenty of Turkey, the gravy is back in the jar, anything left in that box of stuffing?"

Unbelievably, we are back in the kitchen heating up Stove Top Stuffing and carving more Turkey and the condo is at 74º and I think I'll just die. AND I hate carving anything at the Church Lady's condo because there isn't any sharp knives and if you ask Red Sox Steve he'll tell you I like my knives made of steel and razor sharp.

And I hold up the dull knife one last time and look at the decimated bird and I think I might cry.

Happy Thanksgiving indeed.

Posted by M. Hannington at 07:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

Contempt loves the silence
It thrives in the dark
With fine winding tendrils
That strangle the heart

They say that promises
Sweeten the blow
But I don't need them
No, I don't need them

I've been treated so wrong
I've been treated so long
As if I'm becoming untouchable

I'm a slow dying flower
Frost killing hour
The sweet turning sour
And untouchable

Natalie Merchant – Skin

Ophelia is one of the most tragic figures in Shakespeare and Merchant's song "Skin" from her album Ophelia certainly captures that tragedy.

It has been on my iTunes list for a long long time, but I often can't bear to listen to it. It is one of the most sorrowful, painful songs I have ever heard.

Yet so often we allow ourselves to wither and die in delusion, rather than face what appears to be a harsher reality. When realities are shared (or unshared) it can become even more complicated. Working with someone who does not share your goals or is not even aware of your goals, be it partner, friend or lover, is like spinning wheels in the mud.

Sometimes it is unavoidable, but such wreckage can be left behind...

“Hah Penis”

She was two and full of joy. Her father had taught her the phrase and she only knew that it made him laugh. It perturbed her mother, but not enough for her to stop the little girl from always shouting “Hah Penis”

She didn’t know what it meant. She was just Daddy’s girl.

Daddy took care of her, unable to work because of a disease that slowly put more and more pressure on his heart. Once an active athlete now reduced to a sedentary life with the kids and numerous pills.

There were four girls spit out over the last three years. The two-year old was the youngest. Her mother worked at an auto factory, leaving the children she had carried in her womb to put food on the table. She dreamed of being a fashion model, of having a life on her own. One day she threw a chair into the wall and she has never been the same.

She lost her sense of self.

The Self is one. Unmoving, it moves faster than the mind. The senses lag, but Self runs ahead. Unmoving it outruns pursuit. Out of Self comes the breath that is the life of all things.

Unmoving, it moves far away yet near; within all outside all. Of a certainty the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.

How can a wise man knowing the unity of life, seeing all creatures in himself be deluded or sorrowful?

The Upanishads (8th- 5th century B.C.E.)

Pam was beautiful and had a voice like Dianna Ross. A gifted child, she had attended a magnet school that only accepted the best and brightest. She thrilled me with all night debates and her visions of the world. Until the pressure to be a minority, to be part of a race, to be a free woman on her own… Lovers left and father gone; mother starting on a life of her own. Singled out alone.

She no longer slept, ate or washed.

Her whole being left her and she lived in a fantasy world of color.

Phaedrus: But let us go, now that it has become oppressively hot.

Socrates: Shouldn’t we first offer a prayer?

Phaedrus: Of course.

Socrates: Dear Pan, and all you other gods who live here, grant that I may become beautiful within, and that whatever outward things I have may be in harmony with the spirit inside me. May I understand that it is only the wise who are rich, and may I have only as much money as a temperate person needs – Is there anything else that we can ask for, Phaedrus? For me, that is prayer enough.

Phaedrus: Make it a prayer for me too, since friends have all things in common.

Soccrates: Let’s be going.

Plato (428 – 348 B.C.E.)

Michael was bright, energetic and an industrious man with irons in all the right fires. He was a radio DJ and a band manager, who was surrounded by music and love. Together we formed Paradise Records and the band recorded its first single. Summer concerts and radio events blurred by, but life wasn’t that simple.

When I called he had a razor blade in his hands and had already swallowed all the pills he could fit in the palm of his hand.

If the place I want to arrive at could only be reached by a ladder, I would give up trying to arrive at it. For the place I really have to reach is where I already must be.

What is reachable by a ladder doesn’t interest me.

You can’t get there from here – Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889- 1951)

This home, the laptop that I’m typing on, these garden stones? They are nothing compared to being allowed to be. Of feeling the world wrapped around me… When you know that all things are in you like the Upanishads say you can never be sorrowful.

I have slipped away from the world and been in great pain.

Having found it again, I know only peace and wonder. In this state it is impossible to understand pain, impossible to ever feel “untouchable” or wish to die or wish to live or to be afraid of life or afraid of death.

Thoreau said “ Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets.”

I have seen great pain in others, who scratch and claw at the world. Who in holding fast to delusion feel not the safety they seek, but a rising panic.

Sometimes we must just stop and let the world come to us before we can really see, stop moving so that we can go forward.

Photographs by Mary Hannington © 1990

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By Mary Hannington

There's a Greta Garbo and an Alfred Hitchcock

and some black Jamaican stud


There's five Cinderellas and some leather drags


I almost fell into my mug


There's a Crawford, Davis and a tacky Cary Grant


And some Homeboys lookin' for trouble down here from the Bronx


But there ain't no Hairy and no Virgin Mary


you won't hear those voices again


And Johnny Rio and Rotten Rita


you'll never see those faces again

Halloween Parade – Lou Reed

The falafel stand that used to be on Broadway and 92nd is gone its now a small leather goods store. The man that danced me across Broadway every morning that summer in '82, as if he lived just to take me across the street? He was old then and must be gone now too.

I loved how we could stop the crowd with our antics and I wonder why he picked me to dance with. Was it because I was kind to him when he was down?

A dollar a dance… It was a bargain. It was a thrill.

Rick and Alison have long closed their Midtown bar and their relationship went with it. I won’t ever buy funky clothes at the Soho Zoo on Spring Street or watch the drug deals go down in the newly patrolled Washington Square Park.

I don’t wish to spend my days with cattle calls at Donna DeSeta’s looking for the perfect GM or Pink cosmetic's girl. Donna is a sister of Bernadette Peters for those in the know… Norman Leigh, the cinematographer and mentor a Brooklyn tough, who won my heart and captivated my mind. He is here... somewhere.

The faces in the neighborhood around the Belnord are now my New York.

There is Marty that feeds the pigeons his leftover breakfast roll and shares my habit for cigarettes, the Jamaican man in bright colors that never belie his joie de vivre, who hits me up for those cigarettes (less for me) on my nightly walks and smiles his beautiful smile. The little girl with glorious curls that heads out with her Mom as I make my way to the Hot and Crusty.

It's the park where I first met Matt and always ALWAYS the smell of the subway.

New York City has always fueled me. This last trip was no exception and it will be the same for those in the future. Though it might be next year... we'll see.

There is a rhythm to Manhattan always has been. The sway of the subway, sliding through the crowds and the swerving of the cabs… It’s a dance that I love.

And I can sit on a newspaper box in the middle of the city, clear my mind and silence the cabs and find peace in that rhythm, a back beat to the whole world. In New York I can just be a girl sitting on a box.

Sleepless nights in Manhattan are common, but not here. Here it's the sleep of the dead. For in Detroit I’m a provider, a caregiver, an artist, political activist and a neighbor… Can I ever be just a girl sitting on a box?

For days the quiet pierced with sharp noises jarred me. The phlump of my Alvin as he found a cooler spot on the floor, the scrape of Ms. 91’s walker and Slouchy yelling out to no one in his sleep.

For days all sleep and rhythm escaped me.

Who I once was is gone like the man that once danced me across Broadway.

Who I will become depends on being able to be that girl on the box again.

For a brief moment in the early morning hours I found her and I smiled. The rhythm in Manhattan is my rhythm after all. It doesn’t belong to anyone else, but me. It’s my dance that I dance.

Last night I finally slept. I dreamed an epic dream about Macanudo cigars, dogs and cats and a man that was a woman, a beautiful woman, who was worried she was too fat. A typical dream for me, in color and without symbols and labels, these things are just parts of my life and they may only make sense to me.

I have run in the desert with my eyes closed, I have danced alone on rooftops without moving, I know what it means to be Buddha, to awake from the dream of being a separate ego in a material world.

On mountain tops, in cities, floating alone in black water… where doesn’t matter.

The Halloween parade in New York will forever change, but it is still a Halloween parade.

And I love life and Halloween and I LOVE New York.

Photography by Mary Hannington © 2009

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By Mary Hannington

Working in the garden is salvation for me. There is something about physical labor in the great outdoors that pleases me, fulfills me. There is the pleasure of caring for growing things of harvesting your own food. And how that food tastes of the earth. After the labor is done you can sit back and enjoy what you’ve wrought, here almost always in solitude.

My garden is just that. My garden.

Slouchy ventures there only to cut the lawn… Or perhaps he’ll hit the hammock in the sun for a little color to impress his ladies before a trip over the pond. He’s not one to notice the foliage of the Johnson Blue Bells or the tiny, checkered flowers of the Toad Lily.

These things delight me every season and never ever seem to bore.

The garden is something I created with my own hands and the plants carry stories.

The lilacs were my Aunt Marge’s and I’ll now look at them sadly because of her struggle with pancreatic cancer. The Japanese Anemone are from Judy and are riotous with blooms this year.

The light purple lilac from an old friend and from better days when in summers the garden sometimes saw a gathering of friends.

The magnolia now shades, where Memphis lays. The stepping stones to the deeply purple clematis mark my beloved Iggy.

The climbing roses, as old as the house? Their arbor shelters the grave of my loyal Vulcan and remind me of my years with JC and all the years that lead up to another JC and Slouchy.

For three miserable days it has been cool and rainy. Cooped up again, like I have been for weeks, watching over a much weaker Ms. 91. It feels so cruel that I should have my freedom and some much needed Zen for only a few days, then to have it ripped away again.

By endless downpours.

I sit in the kitchen watching the rain while a rabbit snacks on one of my tomatoes.

I remember sitting in other gardens, remember making love in the beautiful gardens of Cranbrook with a beautiful, but fucked up man. I wonder if he ever found peace.

I have now lost the first two men I ever made love with.

What can you plant to remember that?

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By Mary Hannington
“Let go of my ears! I know what I’m doing.” was a favorite line by comic Tim Allen in a bit where he wonders why men didn't have oral sex with their friends. I knew Tim when he was still Tim Dick and just starting out. I was to work with him on many projects that in essence launched both our careers, but it might not have turned out that way. I could have married a young kid with ears that Tim would have cracked about and spent a life of leisure with him, as a lady of the house…

Gorman the Third

A strange thing happened today. I was reminiscing about my childhood (for reasons known only to me and a wonderful new friend) and I decided to Google my very first boyfriend, Gorman J. III. Gorman and I grew up in the Shoals area of the Tennessee River in northern Alabama and for as long as I lived there and sometime after he was my sweetheart. He lived down the hill, from my very modern home, in a large traditionally southern colonial. His mother was a beautiful, gracious belle and his father a successful lawyer. He was their youngest and only son amongst three daughters. Among the hits my search produced I was shocked to find a funeral announcement for his father who had died just days ago. Also a surprise, was that Gorman was not the lawyer I always thought he’d be.

Sheffield, Alabama was famous for only two things. It was the site of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, where the Stones, Joe Cocker, Cher and others recorded some of their biggest hits and it was the actor/politician Fred Thompson’s birthplace. To me it was a place of red clay, dirt roads, an old cemetery and the pond. It was where I played Tarzan and Jane, actually swinging on vines with my brother. It was long slow days spent with my adopted dog Rusty, my best friend Peggy and my boyfriend Gorman.

I have no doubt that Gorman loved me; he would give me moon eyes and tell me I was pretty. He’d con his sister Cecilia into taking us into town so he could buy me an ice cream. He was precocious and funny with a friendly face that had ears that he hadn’t grown into yet. He was older than I, a gentleman through and through. Oh and I loved him too!

I had big plans to show Gorman just how much he meant to me. It took a year of begging, but I was bound and determined to have a certain locket. It was one of those dime store things of filled gold. It may have cost all of ten dollars, but mom thought I was too young for jewelry. She finally relented and the heart shaped locket with a ruby, my birthstone was mine for real. I had a black and white photo Gorman’s Mom had taken of us kids one day in the summer. My sweetheart’s face and mine were all squinty in the bright sunlight as we posed. I took out Mom’s scissors and cut his head out of the photo, trying unsuccessfully to make it heart shaped and managed to cram it under the lip meant to hold such things.


I was only six years old and I didn’t understand much about lovers exchanging pictures. I only knew somehow that wearing his picture meant something. I proclaimed my love for Gorman by showing him the picture in my little gold heart. Years would pass and I would move away and the locket was a prized possession for a very long time. It was tucked in a box with oversized valentines with felt on their covers. The days in my Detroit suburb moved fast and there were other boys and new friends. I was learning to become the woman I am today. Gorman was far from my mind.

I was twelve when my Dad asked if I’d like to go visit the old neighborhood. We were on our way to Florida, but I was excited about going back and seeing the woods and my old haunts. I wasn’t really thinking much about Gorman or Peggy, but about Rusty my faithful dog that was never really mine, but belonged to the neighbor next door. My parents had of course arranged time for us kids to see our old friends. I was to stay with Peggy and go to Gorman’s at noon the next day.

Time seemed to stand still in this little southern town once owned by Andrew Jackson. Gorman’s mother was still beautiful and freshly coifed as always. She had prepared a picnic for just the two of us, Gorman and I. There was a red and white checked tablecloth on the table under the old tree. Sandwiches, fresh cookies and lemonade. For a young girl who made her own lunch everyday this was quite something. I talked about new friends and he told me all about school. Then he looked at me with the same moon eyes he had five years ago and said “I still want to marry you, do you want to marry me?” I wish I could remember what I said. I was floored. Marriage, him becoming a lawyer like his dad, living in a big old house... these were silly childhood dreams.

I think there were letters that dwindled in number. I never did go back. It was such a different place from where I lived my life now and even then at twelve I knew that the differences were vast. Our parents still wrote at Christmas and the last I heard Gorman had never married. After I copied the address of the old church to send a contribution in his dad’s name, the very same church I went to for Sunday school, I looked at the other links.

There he was a doctor of sixteen years with the same brown eyes and the same friendly face that had finally caught up to his ears.

New Harmony

So many things have changed since the sixties and since the last time I visited Alabama. Gorman lives in a loft in a city with a long history of civil rights unrest much like mine. It was one of my dreams to have a loft in Detroit and for a long time I did.

When I opened that studio it overlooked an empty, unused park and at night the streets were silent. When I left it the streets were full of music, the rich and the poor, the black and the white, attending the opera, drinking in bars or sharing a 40 with friends in the park. Smells from the pricey Italian restaurant blended with those of the ribs served up by industrious vendors in parking lots whenever there was a ball game.

I knew that a struggle was coming that would change all that and it did, but after four years it has swung back. My loft is now home to a nursing school, the restaurants are as diverse as the people that dine there. There is harmony now in Harmonie Park and a new harmony in my old friend from the South.

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Isabelle Allende

Isabelle Allende is a Chilean writer, who sometimes uses the "magic realist" tradition in her work. She is the most successful female Latin American writer. Her father was Tomas Allende, the Peruvian diplomat to Chile. She worked for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization from 1959 to 1965 and in 1966 in Santiago, then Europe. She later returned to Chile, working to find safe passage for those finding themselves on wanted lists under Pinochet. Her mother and step-father narrowly escaped assassination and she too had to move to Venezuela.

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year's TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.

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By Mary Hannington

I love the story about Shere Hite’s conversion to the feminist movement.

Her modeling agency sent her to do a TV commercial for Olivetti typewriters. "They were teasing my hair into some ridiculous beehive thing," she recalls. Hite had assumed she had gotten the part because of her typing skills, but as it turned out that was not the case. Olivetti’s new slogan was “The typewriter that's so smart she doesn't have to be".

She read about some women that were picketing Olivetti and joined them, then joined the National Organization for Women and went on to publish the Hite Report.

When I first read this book I already knew the main point to be true. That it was much easier to find satisfaction through masturbation than having "traditional sex" and that most men (back then merely boys) had no idea how to turn women on. Though once I learned I would continue to teach them!

I won't go into that first non-traditional experience, but it was incredibly empowering.

I also remember a conversation with a catholic girlfriend (the only virgin I knew!) in college, who questioned her older sister and I on the topic of masturbation. The nuns at school had taught her that even touching her inner thigh was a sin. Her sister and I smiled at each other and I knew that the two of them would be having a long talk.

This was only some 25 years ago kids! And still today according to Catholic law if you whack off and then die you’re going straight to hell. Since surveys show 95% of American males masturbate and 70% of females do, it’s going to be a crowded place.

The talk happened, but not until after I launched into my “Fish on Friday” lecture and how absurdist religious practices can be. There is nothing in the bible that says you HAVE to fast and meat is as plentiful as fish in modern times, yet millions of Americans sat down to a plate of fish and chips on Friday believing that it brought them closer to God.

It was sheer stupidity!

Christian preachers the world over have condemned masturbation mainly because of an unknown Greek word in the bible. “Malakoi arsenokoitai” is mentioned by Paul in I Corinthians 6:9 as being one of the sins that will send you to hell. Malakoi means soft or fine and early interpretations translated “Malakoi arsenokoitai” to mean soft morals. It was only later that Christians took this (conveniently) to refer to masturbation or homosexuality.

The other rationale was that some guy named Onan, who was forced under some archaic Jewish tribal tradition to marry his brother’s wife and engage in sex with her. Not wishing to impregnate his new wife Onan pulled out early and spilled his seed on the ground making God mad. So poof he killed him. At one time the practice of masturbation was referred to as Onanism.

There is a reason this term fell out of use with the church. If anyone today suggested that brothers ought to be forced to marry their brother’s widows in order to have sex with them and continue the family line AND that if they didn't they’d piss off God we’d have a LATIN word for that.

Insanus!

Shere Hite’s book immediately came under attack by the Christian right as somehow being anti-family. While I don’t think that anyone these days believes that learning to achieve sexual pleasure would destroy the relationship between men and women, some men still see it as a threat to their masculinity and some women still fake orgasms.

Women's rights are still under threat from the Christian right, who preach abstinence and ban the use of birth control for their flock as much as they are by the Islamic extremists, who wrap us in Burqas that cover our whole bodies. When groups see women’s bodies as threats or impure and Hillary’s cleavage is headline news surely it is a sign that the world needs a system of values, based on secular human rights and not silly superstitions.

Hite was one of the women that pointed out to early feminists that wearing lipstick was not necessarily incompatible with feminism. There is pleasure to be derived in being found attractive to a man that doesn’t conflict with feminism’s goals of equality.

Because of her we know that women are much more sexually complex than men. There has been much confirmation that clitoral stimulation and so called G-spot stimulation provide altogether different types of sensations. Many women can experience such intense pleasure from arousal and vaginal stimulation that an orgasm is not necessary for them to feel satisfied, but for most of us Hite's theories have proved true.

And all in all we are much more familiar with our bodies and the spots that make us hot.

She alone raised the idea that what happens during sex is part of the equality and fairness that feminism was seeking, that it is a human right.

*****

This 2006 article by Bryan Appleyard brought a firestorm of support behind Hite.

Bryan Appleyard on Hite

Why Appleyard is writing Science columns I have no idea. He seems to like listening to his own voice more than he does presenting any scientific ideas whatsoever. His take on Darwinism is below:

Bryan Appleyard on Darwin

After the sexual revolution of the 70's, women and men may feel freer to experiment sexually, but women still appear to need some sort of emotional attachment to their partners.

44 per cent of men said they actually prefer no-strings sex, compared to 17 per cent of women -Cosmopolitan 2005

UK Public Health Encourages Masturbation

And of course the folks in Europe are a little less Puritan about it all.

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By Mary Hannington

I have had a few, what I'll call MIRLALFT (meet in real life after a long fucking time) moments of late. A couple of old high school gal pals and I broke bread recently. My friend K found me a week ago on Facebook and during an IM session invited me to come out to a bar for some Belgian feather bowling (more on that later) with an old co-worker and friend.

And that’s when my life became a Fellini film.

Who am I kidding? My life already IS a Fellini film.

What was originally a little get together became a gathering of a dozen or more.

Imagine if you walked into a party and there were 9 people from your high school days that you had worked hard with, played hard with, camped in the woods for weeks with or loved on AND you hadn’t seen any of them for twenty-five years?

We had all worked at the same restaurant. Many of us worked there through high school co-op programs that gave us credit for the work and allowed us only a half-day of classes.

Embarrassingly, I was named “Co-op of the Year” as my required paper on the experience was deemed the best. I turned beet red at the banquet table where I sat, a high school senior with my two young managers, who I also counted as friends.

Had they been just bosses to me it wouldn’t have mattered, but I knew this would provide fodder for future razzing and it did.

It was a blast working there. We often stayed after hours drinking beer and playing cards. The owners far away in Indianapolis would have been shocked, not just at the blatant breaking of the fraternization rule, but the underage drinking and drug use. Many of us camped together on a secluded property, a peaceful river bank, our coolers full of beef tenderloin, boxes of hamburger, and bricks of cheese all procured from the restaurant's wholesalers.

And I had won an award for this?

I’d look at these older faces and would get flash backs of them in restaurant uniforms, some covered in grease, others toting mops, managers watching from the office window or cooks making raw chickens dance in the serving window. An unhappy K shuffling past the cashier's box where I sat, off to deal with another overflowing toilet.

We were so young.

I pictured the birthday parties that went long into the night, where someone always danced on the tables and the summer ball games. Huge volumes of memories came flooding back. These were formative years and these were the friends I spent them with.

I lost touch with reality for a moment and had to sit down.

An old pal passes by my now comatose rigid form, eyes frozen wide open and says, “I know it’s trippy isn’t it.”

And it is!

I recently made this statement to my dear friend and chief therapist:

I’ve gone through my past with you in detail and learned from it (revisited it in very real ways) discarded it for now and intend on living in the future, whatever that means.

Good Golly Miss Molly!

It’s impossible to do.

I spent a year talking about shaking people up, starting a NEW conversation, one that would help to build on the future direction of thought in this country and while everyone here at VagabondGuru.com and I were looking towards the future…

I don't proclaim myself to be the political guru around here. I'm not. I believe that one of the the things that makes this country great is that we take care of those who can't take care of themselves. I also believe that Social Conservatives lack compassion of any sort for the poor and the tired and the huddled masses, who are yearning to be free.

My pal Judy echoing FOX News says, "The housing crisis is the fault of the Clintons opening up mortgages to the poor." Then realizes how that sounds and apologizes. Those damn poor! In the end she agrees it's not that simple.

Two of these friends from my past (K and B) have turned my Facebook page into a hot bed of political discussion.

But it is a tired old conversation.

Illegal Immigrants need to follow our laws.

No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it.

Sounds like a rational idea, but...

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Under H-2B programs American employers can post an ad offering jobs sometimes at ridiculously low wages and then import Mexican workers in under temporary non-immigrant status when no natives have applied or other natives were rejected. There is no follow up by DOL and these workers are beholden to these employers to obtain Visas which often leads to abuses and exploitation. See Farm Workers Justice, Southern Poverty Law Center's Immigrant Justice Program and New York Times. Corrupt contractors and recruiters charge high fees in exchange for these jobs, which creates a workforce that is indebted to the contractors.

So, no arguments from anyone that we don't BRING illegal immigrants into this country!

Exploiting people is racist, shouting for a race of people to “get out” is spreading racism, but I didn’t realize referring to some one as “a white boy with a job” was considered a derogatory remark. I'm just saying... The percentage of Hispanics at the Naturalization Service in Denver doesn’t tell me anything about racism, our government has immigration laws that regulate those numbers, but I never said the U.S. government was racist.

It is PEOPLE, who are racist.

Our country does allow them in. We allowed them in when it was convenient and now that it is INCONVENIENT we should…

The Center for Immigration Studies reports that out of a total of 22 million immigrants with jobs 6 to 7 million of those are illegal immigrants. Though the CIS admits it is difficult to count illegal immigrants and error rates could be as high as 10% it is apparent that illegal immigrants ARE working.

The report concludes:

“If the United States chose to more vigorously enforce immigration laws over the next year, and this resulted in 1 or 2 million illegal workers deciding to leave, it could significantly improve the employment prospects for less-educated natives.”

Since they primarily work in construction, building cleaning and maintenance, food preparation, service and processing, transportation and moving occupations this means K could more easily get his old KP job and go back to dealing with those pesky overflowing toilets.

According to the Bureau of Labor statistics the unemployment rates for July of 2009 were as follows:

Whites (8.6 percent), blacks (14.5 percent), and Hispanics (12.3 percent)

White boys win!

I’m all about seeing this country move forward, so taking AWAY power tools is not something I’d favor. Yes, I realize the sarcasm.

These two voices from my past join with the voices of Americans, who are sick of paying for THOSE people’s healthcare and their kid’s education. The Lou Dobbs’ nightly rants that have Mexicans leaving the country in fear, preferring to live in poverty in their own county rather than face the hate that exists here.

That the rise in illegal Mexican immigrants has halted was reported by the Pew Hispanic Center and they estimate the population at 4% of the total US population.

They are here and they worked harder for less pay than most Americans were willing to and they still do. Help them to more easily get citizenship and become a part of this country, but don't call them criminals and enmasse shout at them to "GET OUT". There are more reasonable solutions than trying to scare 11 million people out of the country by posting "Hispanics Keep Out" signs.

In my mind now is a flashback of K's beautiful Mexican wife, how her joie de vivre swept me off my feet. I could so clearly see how the spirit of Mexico lived inside of her and was glad that she was here to now add it to the spirit of our country.

My suggestion to K is that we celebrate these things.

Like the sport of feather bowling and the fact that Belgians were allowed to come to Detroit and share a pastime that is played nowhere else, but in Detroit and Belgium. How fucking cool is that? Lé Detroit was once a French colony so it is appropriate France's neighbor be represented here too don't you think?

It is a simple game, really. Played in a dirt lane, with 12 blocks of wood resembling cheese wheels (6 per team) that you roll towards a feather in hopes that your team's ball is the closest, for only then can you score points. Only the balls closer than your opponent's count and it takes ten points to win a round.

The lanes are curved so that you can manoeuvre the balls in S-curves past the others that are obstacles to your goal. Or charge straight ahead and try and bump them out of the way.

A metaphor for life that perhaps we can all learn from.

Is it WRONG to help those less fortunate than us around the obstacles to a better life? Can I truly say my father immigrated here as a child so I am in and to hell with everyone else? Nope I can't.

Those that want to close our borders to the rest of the world aren't looking to the future. They are living in the past.

You can't block those wanting to get closer to the feather just because you are already there.

Posted by M. Hannington at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

Welcome to the first addition of Sick. You will find these comics peppered throughout VagabondGuru.com, where along with the reader we continually seek to understand what exactly makes a Vagabond Guru tick and what it is like for him to live life sick but still active in his cage.

Posted by M. Hannington at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Jessica Care Moore

the homeless man gives my son a dollar.
i am hiding.
hoping to not look like i'm doing well.
doing well doesn't
go with the chairs at this office.

i am thankful and embarrassed.

the same day i was booked for a show in paris,
asked to be in a film being shot in harlem in the summer
and booked for a keynote at another college.

my son's health insurance was cancelled by the state.
and the daycare said i owe them three grand and i
have to pay it so my son can register
for the new year.

the daycare lady is asking me if i have a job

again.

i am a famous, recognized poet and writer.
i have performed in south africa.
i am an apollo legend.

remember me?

i was on the cover of the metro times last month?
the cover of african american family when my son
began here in the summer. his pic on the inside.

my photos are in full color and six feet tall at
the museum of african american history.
i am one of the women of a new tribe.

i am on exhibit, on display.

always, on display.

exactly what does being a legend pay?
i need some w2's for this life

king's father says he wants a dna test.
i'm told my son is apparently from an
affair with a rapper
i used to love..
so why am i calling
you for
winter sweaters?

this is madness, i tell myself.

in order to receive help from the state
you have to be working.

my writing is my work. i can't have my
son 24 hours a day and write and create

new work.

question marks float on top of the head
of the case workers?

herbie hancock plays in the background
this is the music i brought into this place.

never leave your music at home.
never leave your music at home.

they only play the tv on one station
in the lobby
the sci fi channel or something.

sometimes there are cookies full
of m&m's

king, don't touch the cookies baby.

i made up a job because my job is not a job
i made up a job because my job is not a job

and apparently told them i made too much money
that doesn't really exist.

so now i will be allocated twelve dollars
a month for food.

my 1st husband calls me by mistake.
in the middle of all this..

we laugh about reading poems for 20 years.
our son, my earth son cracks jokes
about him getting old.

we are elders and we still young
says kevin powell.

this is a thankless job, weldon irvine
would whisper in my ear at the
schomburg before he killed himself
a few years later.

thankless.
thankless
thankless

thank you
thank you
thank you

thankless thankless thankless thank you thank you…

joni mitchell to drown out the moment
mariah carey anita baker jennifer hudson
and yeah, even that new beyonce song.

if i were a boy.

thank you

angels past lover’s ex-husbands
rappers dj's producer’s basketball
players guitar players novelists
philosophers. painters. bullshitters.

haters. liars. oh. the liars. bless you.

industry intellectuals that will never
get it.

all you deep mutha fuckas

thank you

mos

for telling me it was honorable
to live my life
travel the world

and when people ask what i

do

i simply say

i am a poet.

thank you kweli for being there
when i needed you.

thank you roger guenevere smith

for huey and the head nod

to ossie for the elbow in my arm

and that smile

thank you ma nana for buying
coats and uncles for shoes
and daycare.

moore family.

i have more family.

i was born a moor. (on screen)

i'm headed to la for some shows.
i have to stop crying and write

this show.

this is not a show.
this is my life

god.

this is my life.
this is my life

my blessing
my gift.

gotta gig in nati while i
was writing this.

my january rent

thank you

daddy god past lover’s
present lover
got your text baby.
i'm okay.

thankless thankless

thanksgiving
no thank you
said the abused turkeys

no thank you
for your slaughter
in the name of giving
in the name of family

this is what i have to

give.

i'm eating poems today.

i'm thankful
i'm humiliated
i'm embarrassed
i'm surviving

i'm surviving
i'm writing

odetta just died

you can't stop me
no, you can't stop me.

this is my job

dammit.

this is my job. u know?

i am a mother. give me my check.

amen
amen
amen.

a woman.

a poet

thank you
thank you
thank you.

i'm hiding all the turkeys
in my backyard next year.

then how u gonna give thanks?
some gotta die for you to be
thankful?

i miss you
yale
richard pryor
tom moore
miriam makeba
sekou sundiata
weldon irvine
joseph
rosa parks

you can't find them
you can' t find me.

we are busy writing
we are busy confusing
your paperwork with real

life

my lover says he talks to
me in real

life

the internet is an illusion
people addicted to illusions

though?

thankless thankless

world.

not me not me not

me.

notmenotmenotmenotmenotmenotmenotme.......

not

me.

Posted by LITA Staff at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A note from your editor:

By Mary Hannington

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.

David Cronenberg

Red Sox Steve said something the other day about my being a perfectionist.

It really stung.

But he is right. I waste time and energy trying to make everything perfect and therefore nothing is and never will be.

He has seen my house and the chaos that exists in it. It’s hardly perfect and though I admit I’d like it to be better, more perfect… I’m also a realist and know that will take massive effort and time. Something that I seem to lack in increasingly greater amounts these days, but massive effort? That something I’m used to.

The truth is almost nothing is perfect about my life.

There are days when I have so much to do I forget to eat.

It is impossible to do everything perfectly, so some things fall by the wayside.

“So WHAT if all the columns aren’t edited and don’t have pictures.” Says Steve “Your main focus has to be taking care of Ms. 91.”

He’s right. It is.

And sometimes I’m bad at that too.

I forgot to fill her all-important synthroid prescription yesterday and she had to go without. I haven’t made her dermatologist or her dentist appointments yet, finished the room upstairs in case she needs it or swept her room downstairs which does… need it.

And I run a business too that at the moment I have to restructure.

I work freelance as a designer.

Me

I’m currently working on a pitch due in September on a film in London.

Slouchy wrote the script, is producing the film, and is a full partner on any backend profits, but I’m not a shoe in for the part I’m looking for, Production Designer.

I’ll have to devote some considerable time into not just helping Slouch with development, but a mood book and a treatment of the tone of the film and specific scenes. That's a lot to have on a plate for a perfectionist like me, but I'm not looking for sympathy.

It's my roller coaster life. Either it is slowing to a crawl at the top of the incline or running full speed to the bottom of the hill.

Then there is this place that I’m writing and creating in, you think it’s chaotic now?

Oh just wait!

Cause the truth is I suck at this too.

I built just what Guru wanted, which was something from the past. Past dreams are powerful things and Guru is a talented guy, who certainly deserves his dreams, but he knows as well as I that dreams are often shattered.

We move on...

Quest into the unknown... or the 21st century.

So when we think something is not working around here. I’ll turn it upside down, broom it around or just plain blow it up!

This may lead to reader frustration, confusion or they may just be chaotic people like Matt and I and dig the surges of creativity and lulls of crises that go along with real life.

So Fuck Perfectionism. Nothing is EVER perfect!

My work here and elsewhere will always the best it can be. BUT it is a creative process and that is subject to change, to evolution that takes an ever better path and change can be chaotic.

Change is also necessary for us to grow, redefine and become, if not perfect, better.

Posted by M. Hannington at 06:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

You Tube Link

No Trouble/ No War

From the award-winning documentary, "Playing For Change: Peace Through Music", comes the first of many "songs around the world" being released independently. Featured is a cover of the Ben E. King classic "Stand by Me" played and sung by musicians around the world adding their part to the song as it travelled the globe. Other songs include "One Love", "Don't Worry" and the above song "No War/No Trouble"

Playing for Change

"As we made our way around the world we encountered love, hate, rich and poor, black and white, and many different religious groups and ideologies. It became very clear that as a human race we need to transcend from the darkness to the light and music is our weapon of the future. This song around the world features musicians who have seen and overcome conflict and hatred with love and perseverance. We dont need more trouble, what we need is love. The spirit of Bob Marley always lives on."

Posted by M. Hannington at 06:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You Tube Link

If

by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;


If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;


If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";


If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Jameson, whose father was the poet Robert William Jameson, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and received his name from an American, Leander Starr. This gentleman hauled his father out of a canal he had fallen into while on a walk as he was awaiting the birth of his son.

Posted by M. Hannington at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You Tube Link

Potoo Bird

A cool little bird that has evolved to a perfect state of invisibility. What a delightful thing to be able to do. This film was shot for the BBC and features David Attenborough.

Posted by M. Hannington at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By M. Hannington

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

~ Socrates

When you’ve been in the money you learn some things:

(1) It’s cheaper to buy in bulk

(2) Quality things last forever (and you can always sell them if you need to).

When I go out to purchase my poison (I’m celebrating tonight, but there is nothing like getting blurry-eyed drunk for no reason at all, shivering naked in a blanket and crying like a baby over a picture of you as a kid because life was so fucking simple back then.) I buy a half a gallon. I like wine too and I buy that by the case (10% off) and on sale.

When the Winter Ale goes on sale in the Spring? I’m there!

Nothing like a cold beer after slaving my ass off in the vegetable garden. Yep, I grow healthy food for the dog and I. What better way to combat the effects of that last session of trying to drown out the miseries of your life? AND when I'm stumbling around at night the dog has the needed energy to get out of my way!

And when you’re broke too? You can live on salad!

Why don't we get drunk and screw?

~ Jimmy Buffet

Anyways, I’m at the liquor store and there’s an old guy approaching the line and he insists that I go ahead of him. Clearly his beautiful son knows dad’s routine well and he gives me that pained look. Pops has been having a pop every night for a long time.

I ask the clerk for a half-gallon of my own poison.

Old guy: "Shit I'm going wherever you're going tonight"

Me: "Hey, hey this was meant to last a long time!"

Old guy: "Yeah, all night! Take off that blue tooth baby (my ear bud) we're going to have fun tonight!"

Me: Winking at his son. "Nothing wrong with a little fun!"

Old Guy: “Girl knows how to party right here. What you got to go with that bottle baby I bet you’re doing it up right!”

Me: (As the Old Guy continues) “Sure pops, you and me.”

Old guy: Steps to the counter and says loudly,"I'll have a half pint of the same!"

The whole store is now laughing and I’m already in tears, now about to pee my pants. Young son, the hope of the future looks at me and gets it. Nothing gets us city folk down these days, hard times or not we're going to have our recreation time!

I may have the bigger bottle, but Pops? A half pint is about all he really needs.

I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.

~ Frank Sinatra

There’s nothing wrong with tying one on every once in a while. I mean think of all the experiences you wouldn’t have had without that extra courage.

Waking up to Chris Hansen when I was just seventeen? Never would’ve happened.
(Okay, I was eighteen and nothing happened, but he didn't KNOW that.)

Naked on the golf course? Never would’ve happened.

That seventh ear piercing? Maybe sobriety was a better idea in that case.

The images on Polaroids that are in the little wooden box? No way any of that would have happened.

Some people have even fallen in love and gotten married all in one night. Think of all the time that saved. Getting to know each other. Wondering if you should sleep with him or if you were better off as friends. The whole engagement thing and who do you tell first. Chances are you are going to get divorced anyway.

An old girlfriend sent me a pic of her and hubby in front of the McMansion. And I’m looking at the funky older guy in the plaid golf pants and thinking, “She either married for money or there was liquor and lots of drugs involved.” Probably still is!

As I sit here typing this out in the YMCA's adults only lounge, where some moron is loudly playing along with Family Feud, while the rest of us sit with our laptops looking annoyed. And if that isn't enough he's got a big ass bag of chips, which he eats with his mouth open. I'm thinking shit might as well just start drinking now.

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!

~ William Shakespeare, Othello

Maybe they should change the sign to "adult behavior only", because it seems that some people don't have to drink to be irksome, they just ARE.

Posted by M. Hannington at 05:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You Tube Link

Obama/McCain Dance Off

Brought to you by the nice folks at Mini-Movie. This piece has nicely roto-scoped mouth positions for both candidates. Allowing them to speak the words means finding footage that contains enough positions of the mouth for each letter and sound that also matches the angle of the face. Then the mouth and the face of the candidate must be motion tracked onto the actors bodies sometimes frame by frame. This is done by tracking the candidate's faces to points on the actor's face. As the actor dances the face moves with him.

The beginning shot with the handkerchief is simple a reverse shot of the actors dropping handkerchiefs.

Posted by M. Hannington at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By M. Hannington

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

When Farah Fawcett died this week I was reminded of seeing "Burning Bed" and being glad that the bastard burned, but it never dawned on me back then that I would ever face such an ordeal or anything remotely like it.

It wasn’t completely true.

There are plenty of men willing to use force to control women. I’ve been held down or pushed into the dark corner of a bar, forced to go along until grips loosened and I could escape. My hand has been made to feel hard-ons and I've felt strangers hands in subways, crowded dance floors and concert mosh pits where escape was near to impossible.

On a primal level, women are most afraid of men using their brute force, but at the same time that strength is often a turn on.

It is something to be worked out in the bedroom and not by strangers in a night club, unless of course you dig that sort of thing.

In our reptilian brains, fear and sex are closely related. Psychologists believe that this is because in our primitive past having sex left one open to predators and so went hand in hand with fear.

Making a double backed beast out in the open where giant crocodiles like Sarcosuchus imperator , whose 5 foot long jaws could swallow you whole was indeed a risky romp.

I have come to realize that I’m a risk taker and I have been for a long, long time. Fear is something I have always romanced.

When dad first pretended to toss me over the observation wall at the Wilson Dam in Muscle Shoals, he not only gave me my first delight of fear, but also managed to totally freak out mom.

It started with climbing ever higher in trees and exploring abandoned places that other children wouldn’t dare. I scaled steep cliffs, tried my hand at the trapeze and tight rope and did back flips off high dives.

I loved that buzz so close to sexual arousal. The horror movie tension…

Red herring, red herring… and then, when you’re not expecting it, WHAM drooling alien with metal teeth.

Shiver!

Guys if you haven’t figured out why the haunted house is the best date event at the amusement park you’re a little slow on the uptake.

I also tried every drug known to man. Qualudes, Reds, Speed, Pot – Acapulco Gold, Panama Red, Hashish & THC, Opium, Heroine, ‘Shrooms, Blotter Acid, Mescaline, Window Pane, Peyote, and Cocaine. And later Crack before it was called Crack (and I won’t ever go there again).

It was mostly the thrill of the unknown and not the drug’s effect that I was seeking.

By the time I made it to college my grades had suffered, but for the most part I had satiated my curiosity and there was nothing much left to try.

And it was upwards academically from there.

My next fearful exploit became “trestling”, where you sat on the stone wall of a trestle bridge and waited for a train to fly past merely inches away from your face.

We’d scream our bloody heads off knowing that a loose part traveling at 60 mph could turn you to sludge in an instant, but we'd do it again and again.

I once met a student from Kent State at the trestle, an ultimate Frisbee player like me, who had lain on the tracks and let the train pass over him.

The way he described the ordeal and was so open about his fear… Needless to say I was smitten, but long distance college relationships often fizzle and outside of some love letters it went no farther.

There was diving off rock cliffs and into the black waters of a gravel pit. An abandoned place, near to where I lived in Lansing, it was not only a way to cool off on a hot night, but swimming naked and alone on moonless nights was delightfully scary and a Zen thing at the same time.

Years later while attending the broadcast conventions in Las Vegas I discovered “Der Stuka” and “Bomb Bay” water slides on the Vegas strip. To ride "Bomb Bay" you entered a capsule, crossed your legs at the ankles, wrapped up your arms and the operator opened a trap door and sent you plummeting on an almost vertical 76 foot free fall.

On the way down I was sure I was going to die. No human being should ever EVER travel that fast!

I did it over and over.

For years I often had my lunch and a sunbath on a two-foot ledge, eight stories off the ground. Knowing that when I moved to recline or to get off that a slight slip could send me plunging.

I loved it!

BUT being a risk taker also meant I tended to trust people I barely knew.

This sometimes proved problematic and men often had expectations that I was unwilling to meet.

Unfortunately, some men will never understand that “No means no!” and women are always going to have to deal with that.

Luckily, smarts got me through those situations.

I was able to give one overly gropey fellow the slip after yelling “Hey you just loosened my wooden leg!”

And I’m still waiting to use the Alka Seltzer and water trick, where you let loose with some foamy drool.

Sure to stop even the most arduous.

Psychologists say that what men fear most in relationships is the witch who uses her feminine wiles to trap them. And in looking at serial killers; the female variety tend to trap and use poison on intimates, while the male tend to hunt and stalk strangers. Unfortunately, women are more likely to be killed by intimates than by strangers.

Women fear the brute and men the trickster.

In both cases what we fear is a loss of control, but sometimes that's also the very thing that turns you on. Making relationships tricky things. One can never assume that the shy librarian will be docile in the bedroom or that the football jock doesn't long to be tied up.

Relinquishing control is okay if there exists the one thing that any relationship requires and that is trust.

Without that, force will most likely only produce the kind of body tensing fear that nobody likes to feel. And afterall, shouldn't nookie be equated with getting loose?

That kind of fear almost always leads in my case to the fight instinct and when faced with a big strong man it is not always the right approach.

I once used a well aimed kick to end a stream of emotional abuse and was sorry for it afterwards. It made me no better than the abuser. There are 5.3 million women in America that face this dilemma all the time and while I may have fun with fear I would never want to join their ranks.

BUT if love and life were bereft of risk, fun and rides on water slides, what good would it be?

Posted by M. Hannington at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By M. Hannington

My father was a Major in the Quartermasters Company of the 96th Infantry division, more specifically the Deadeyes, so named because of the division's superior rifle marksmanship. They were involved in the Battle of Leyte and the Battle of Okinawa, receiving Bronze Stars for valor and were awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for heroic action during World War II in 2001- awarded only six months before he died - one of only four ever issued. In taking Okinawa, part of the Ryukyu Islands of Japan, over 12,000 U.S. soldiers were killed and the Japanese referred to this battle as "tetsu no ame" or rain of steel. His job was to oversee the transfer of land vehicles and men from the ships to the island.

He achieved his Masters of Business in only four years at the University of Michigan and would go on to become the comptroller of a Ford plant in Alabama. A plant where black workers weren't allowed to eat in the cafeteria with whites. With the help of Stanley Rosenbaum, a prominent resident of nearby Florence this was soon changed. Whether my father's love of Frank Lloyd Wright started at this time - Rosenbaum owned the only Wright designed house in Alabama - I'll never really know. This was the time of Wallace in a place that was resisting the segregation of schools. The plant was later closed for fear of unionization and our brief four years in the south came to an end. We moved back to Detroit where my father's father had worked in the iron foundries and later also for Ford. Dad retired in the early 80's, spent most of that time designing a new home and then moved away while I was attending Michigan State University and for years he was a diminishing influence in my life.

Dad was smart and confident, a business man through and through. A conservative that us kids would sometimes see as a fuddy-duddy.

Mom followed the music of the times and we kids controlled the radio player in her car. Not so with my father, who typically had a classical station on.

Mom wore a MuMu and shirts with Nehru collars; Roots sandals or Earth shoes and she delighted in my own style of dressing. The African designer Kenzo before he was well known, with his bright colored cloth dresses in amazing shapes, young Danish designers bought at hip little boutiques, whose clothes looked like rags, tight bikini jeans and teeny weenie bikinis.

Dad shook his head or averted his eyes. He was a man solidly in the 1950's. An older father two generations removed from mine.

Mom dealt with our daily lives, our friends and I think sugarcoated some of the unpleasantness.

The night some friends drove me home in my car after a drinking contest and I puked on her feet? She didn't tell my father about that and felt the resultant hangover was punishment enough.

When she caught my friends screwing in my bed one night thinking the family was on a vacation? She came to me about it and it stayed between us.

It's not that I was dishonest with my father exactly, but he seemed to think I was responsible enough to lead a proper life. And he asked few questions during my high school years.

My dad spent his whole life educating me, providing me with books, articles and taking us to historical places. In our extensive travels we never EVER went anywhere without learning the history of the state we were in. And sometimes vacations were strictly educational affairs that us kids hated.

Left home alone since I was eight I had proved capable.

By twelve Dad was no longer kissing me goodnight; I had long ago become too old for that.

When the sex talk finally came it was brief and from Mom and was met with "I know all that!"

This left my teenage years with little advice from my Mom and none from my father, who was totally unaware of the scene - still existing in his 50's world.

I set about discovering who I was at record pace.

Sexually active before all my girlfriends with men much older than I... Their friends later providing me with a myriad of drugs and happily buying my beer... By the time I was sixteen I was drinking in bars in Detroit easily passing for over eighteen.

Mom let me live my life and learn from my mistakes, not really knowing much about my world either. When I held a party at the house, she'd be up at five in the morning to clear the neighborhood of beer bottles. When my friends, who were taking care of the house, were arrested for marijuana possession when a nosey neighbor called the police?

My mom forgave them and refused to press charges.

When I'd creep in at the wee hours of the morning night after night. Dad was always sleeping and Mom in a tearful conversation pleaded with me to at least call when I'd be late and while I lived at home I did.

When the drug use slowed and I began to seriously study the world. Dad watched me turn liberal, a bra-less feminist and a reader of Marxist literature. He no longer knew what to make of me. Switching my degree from advertising to art was the last straw.

His smart, confident, albeit exhibitionistic daughter was now a leather clad, multiple earring-ed, wild haired artist, whose visits to his own vision of a Wright-style home on a Tennessee cliff included topless tanning!

He'd shake my hand hello and no longer hug me.

Our sole connection centered on photography the one hobby we shared and studied. While mom loved the nudes of Imogen Cunningham, my dad's taste ran more towards the nature photographers like Ansel Adams and he preferred Weston's less overtly sexual pieces.

It wasn't until I met Jerry that he had hope that I'd at least be cared for, despite not approving of my living with a man. Never believing that a career in the arts would give me the kind of 1950's type of success he expected from his daughter.

He understood that women now had this freedom, but missed the point that it also meant the freedom to choose what made one happy...

I spent almost twenty years trying to break down the barriers between my dad and I.

We didn't agree on politics, our schools were rivals, but we learned to make political races and college football games topics we could approach with humor and an intelligent understanding of our own spheres of the world. We at long last could talk about sex and love and life.

The day he died I was holding his hand. I had told the doctor to remove the feeding tube and I knew that his organs would begin to shut down, that it wouldn't take long. I sat with a man that for many years I didn't feel I knew, but who had become at the end a great friend.

For a half an hour I told him everything I had left to say. Then I told him the one thing he needed to hear. That I would always take care of mom, he didn't need to worry about that. It was okay to leave us now, we would be okay.

I never knew if he had killed anyone in the war, or even been shot at, if he had had any great loves before he met my mom or if he was ever scared of life. We hadn't gotten that far during our reacquaintance.

The time had past for that.

I could only listen to the change in his breathing and whisper "It's okay, it's okay, it's okay.", until that breathing finally stopped.

Human life is complicated and the choices I have made have to do with innumerable influences in my life, but not having a father's advice on relationships, sex and the world of men, at least until towards the end of his life, made a profound difference.

I sought sensitive artistic types, who I felt would understand me and ran from stronger more confident sorts of men, who I thought would seek to control my life. In truth and knowing many of the latter men today, they have always accepted me for who I am and reveled in the paths I have taken in life more so than the others.

Much like my dad did in the end, they've helped me to see my path more clearly.

We may not have seen eye to eye on everything, we agreed to disagree, but he DID finally understand me and not being able to see my life through his eyes these past 7 years has made staying on that path even harder.

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Non-Newtonian Liquids

A cornstarch and water mixture, sometimes called oobleck, is an example of a Non-Newtonian Liquid. This is essentially a liquid when at rest, but when agitated it takes on the properties of a solid. Most polymer solutions are non-Newtonian as is blood and ketchup. These fluids' viscosity change under stress and over time. They are difficult to define because not only are there viscosity changes, but at varying rates. Scientists instead use continuum mechanics to study tensor values and use constitutive equations to study the liquids in various states.

Called shear thickening fluids, they are being researched for bullet resistant body armor because they remain liquid and soft until impacted. There are also shear thinning fluids like paint which flow when agitated. These are called pseudoplastic fluids. One example is toothpaste that can be made to flow out of the tube by squeezing, but will set up on a toothbrush and not fall off.

NASA:The Physics of Whip Cream

Not everything in this world is as it seems and without science and curious cooks of old that studied this type of phenomenon we would be in a world without whip cream or pudding and conveniences like toothpaste. Scientists are just beginning to understand shear-thinning liquids and applications of new theories could be of great benefit in developing high-performance oils or to the plastics industry in the molding process.

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By M. Hannington

…into the trash.

Running at full steam these days.

Monday. Wednesday. Friday. Short quiet mornings with a little time to think, to read or to write and then it is off to the Y and the races.

Up to the second floor class, 45 minutes in the lounge to write and create, down to the locker where Ms. 91 changes and I bust through a 15 minute workout, out to the pool lounge 30, maybe 40 minutes to work and then to the pool to fetch her for a shower, bust through a 10 minute workout, out of the shower into a handicapped stall to change, bust through another 10 minutes of ab crunches, fix her hair, put on shoes and socks and we are off wheeling home for the making of lunch, doing of dishes and wiping the kitchen down.

Tuesday. Thursday. Free days that have filled with doctor appointments, lab runs and lunches.

Leaving weekends as the only full days to deal with a run down 110 year-old house that needs me too.

A massive list of things to do here that can't be looked at for fear of freezing up in terror at how daunting it is. Armed with the knowledge that it can be done, but only if ticked off a list one at a time.

Everyone that lives in this historic neighborhood understands how a twelve-step program works equally as well on a house.

1. I admit I am powerless over the enlarging plaster cracks and falling stucco, that my life of endless construction has become unmanageable.

2. That only by mediation, yoga, expensive Italian plasterers, or a giving over to all the vast restoration knowledge can bring sanity.

3. Once we have turned over some of this work to painters or neighbors and read the plasterers manual AGAIN can we feel at peace.

4. That water dripping from the ceiling can't just be ignored and the peeling paint must be duly noted and added to the list.

5. We must explain to the electrician that tube and loop wiring may not be modern nor easy, but it is what we have.

And so on…

While coats of plaster dry…

Eight loads of laundry to go. Still sorting through clothes - I have far too many and too little closet space.

How many pairs of paint-stained sweats does a girl really need?

They hit the trash.

And really, splattering paint on my clothes, it's one of my many fortes and I rest comfortably in the knowledge that there will be a new pile soon enough.

The dress I bought on Queen Street in Toronto? A small designer, who made things of fabric that appeared to belong in curtains or upholstery (reminded me of “Gone with the Wind”), it makes me laugh, it stays.

The lime green one? What was I thinking?

The olive green number from Soho's Zoo? Tight, short… why not?

The batik thing, the peasant skirt, a woven suede shirt (Ew!), an aqua blue sweater and every single Christmas and birthday gift for the past five years, ugh, disasters and into a bag for charity they go.

Do people really wear sweaters like this? One in shades that should never coexist with each other, so thick it must weigh 10 pounds and feels more like armor. Another with knit pom-poms everywhere.

I have a confession to make to my gift givers - I don't like red velvet (especially combined with heart-shaped buttons), pom-poms on sweaters have never been my style and I like flowers in my garden not on my clothes.

I have never been a hearts, flowers and pom-pom girl, never will be!

While we are in a confessional mood… I always dress for Halloween, but NEVER EVER do I wear red and green for Christmas or pastels or anything with bunnies or chicks hatching out of eggs on Easter Sunday.

Okay, TWENTY-FIVE caps?

The sports ones are keepers; Red Wings and Yankees, David Bowie Nine Inch Nails, Yahats Oregon, Purple velvet (so Motown), the grey wool is Hip Hop cool, but the ones that advertise?

They go.

That makes ten.

The Aussie hat from the World's Fair? Where I was so drunk on Fosters beer and so fucking mad at Jerry I threatened to jump off a bridge? Good times. I think I'll keep that one.

A whole grocery bag full of hats for the J House boys next door, who are all struggling with one addiction or another and since they also help around my house, the hats will prevent the splattering paint from hitting their hair.

They keep me company during my front porch smoke breaks.

This is a new habit that has worked wonders to end Ms. 91's latest obsession, my cough. Still fighting a nasty cold, my morning smoke starts a barrage of deep-chested hacking coughs that have her convinced I'm not long for this world.

Now she says “Hey you're not coughing so much!” and she's pleased that despite the fact my doctor has confirmed I have working lungs, my death may indeed be postponed for a while.

It's off to the garden, where digging in dirt is joy, but the weeds are getting the best of me. Where things like wheelchairs and a kitchen pig, who glares at me, clearly don't belong. Perhaps it was that same glare that caused Slouchy to leave her in the yard instead of the dumpster bound trash pile I put her in.

Regardless, one doesn't really NEED a kitchen pig does one? Especially one that has seen her day and once Slouch has been safely deposited at the airport for another round of castles and dinners in Merry Olde England, she goes.

There is Slouchy too, who suddenly wants a tan to hide the well-earned age spots, he could use a professional organizer too.

So, the roller derby shirt with the two inch holes, the halogen desk lamps that haven't worked for five years and the kitchen pig- bye bye. You really won't miss them.

It will all get added to the list along with the shower installation, patching of plaster cracks, repairing stucco, painting the kitchen walls, putting a cement stone patio in the low spot by the back deck, fixing the grill, stacks of stuff that may finally sell on Ebay…

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You Tube Link

Seth Meyers Webby Monologue

Seth Meyers is currently the headwriter at Saturday Night Live. He was born in New Hampshire and graduated from Northwestern University in 1994. His career includes stints on Mad TV, That 70's Show, and his current role on SNL began in 2001.

The monologue is a hilarious look at the financial crisis and the internet. Where would we be without the World Wide Web?

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By M. Hannington

Their names are Pinky (she likes to dye her hair pink) and Pointy (his winter hat is so tall I wonder if the hair underneath matches).

I see them around all the time, but we have never really interacted. So I have given them names.

Closer to home, there is Chris, who is bi-polar and can’t always get his meds. White and blonde, he says the others sometimes tease him as he waits in a parking lot for day jobs. There is Brother Michael, not quite right, but functional and he comes and goes, but sometimes does yard work for me.

They are all the victims of another recession at another time when many of the states mental institutions were closed. They survive on the odd job, return money from bottles found and the handout.

They have for years.

From 1987 until the mid-90’s I had a regular bottle man. He would come and collect my returns once a week. An alcoholic, he lived with family and in and out of shelters for most of his adult life. I'll never forget the paper-like feel of his hands and the scars that he said came from sleeping outside.

Clean for many months, he was finally able to, with a relative, get a home of his own. I never saw a happier man.

He died shortly afterwards.

You wouldn’t have known that he was only 58 years old.

In downtown Detroit the panhandlers are different now.

They introduce themselves and shake your hand. They tell you their stories. The overused "I'm just trying to get bus fare home.", is a thing of the past. I'm curious if this is because they are so new to the game, the politeness? Or is there a sense that we are more connected.

All of us in the same boat…

On a recent trip to the Detroit river front, Red Sox Steve and I ran across half a dozen men fishing for Walleye, which is in season from March until June. Many of them are elderly and in scooters having been dropped off for the day by family or perhaps navigated the long dirt path to the river on their own.

Owen Park looks more neglected than usual, it is only half mowed and in the place of the oil drums painted kelly green that serve as trash cans are instead piles of trash. It is typically empty on weekdays and it's a rare sight to see so many men out fishing during the work week. One wonders if this is a new way for them to put food on the table. How long can you survive on fish and unemployment? Are they destined for the streets too?

There are the lucky ones. If you can call it that.

Like the man in the wheelchair, who worked 8 Mile Road for a decade. 8 Mile has long been known as a dividing line between wealthy white suburbanites and poor urban blacks. The wheelchair was a prop, an aid to making a living. He was hit by a car that broke both his legs and his arm. He walks with a limp now, but the insurance company paid a nice fat settlement and he is living large.

My neighbor's sister. On the street with her son, unwilling to reach out to family. Now stricken with cancer and fighting to live. She has found them and a home again.

What will it be like a year from now. Ten years from now?

Where will these people call home?

Under Governor Engler's term (1991 - 2003) homelessness nearly doubled in the city of Detroit.

The Engler administration closed 10 of the state’s 15 psychiatric hospitals (more than any other state). Hundreds of mentally ill patients were turned over to understaffed support groups across the state and city of Detroit. In 2003, the 1,200 bed Northville Psychatric hospital, operating since 1950 was closed after State employees there were offered lucrative retirement packages. The sale of the land and hospital netted the state 31.5 million.

According to a 2003 article in Psychiatric News:

A study by Michigan Department of Community Health found a 50 percent rate of mental illness and a 34 percent rate of serious mental illness among jail inmates in three counties, while an older study, with which Michigan State University was involved, revealed that at least 20 percent of state prison inmates had serious mental illness.

At the time the State reported only 6% of inmates required mental health care.

Over 75% of the U.S. homeless live in cities.

In recent times there has been a shift in those seeking shelter from single adult men to the working poor and families. 50% of the homeless have jobs, but are unable to afford housing. 23% of those sleeping in COTS emergency shelters in Detroit are children. Nationally 56% of persons from homeless families are children under ten.

MSHDA estimated 15,928 homeless persons in Detroit in 2006 with about 11% or 1,856 of those being among the chronically homeless, most of these are either mentally ill or addicts.

Current estimates by Detroit area charities now put the number of those living rough on the streets at 13,000.



On June 1st, 2009 GM filed for bankruptcy citing a debt of 172 million dollars. It is estimated that 20,000 Union workers will lose their jobs because of the filing. It remains to be seen what the real impact of the bankruptcy will have on the City of Detroit, but as of November 2010 GM began hiring in earnest.

Photos by Mary Lee Hannington ©2009

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You Tube Link

George Carlin "It's Bad for Ya"

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it. – George Carlin

Take a fucking chance! Put a little fun in your life! ... most Americans are soft and frightened and unimaginative and they don't realize there's such a thing as dangerous fun, and they certainly don't recognize a good show when they see one.
– George Carlin

George Carlin was born in 1937 to Mary Beary and Patrick Carlin. His mother, who left his father when Carlin was only two months old, raised him in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. Carlin would later refer to the neighborhood as White Harlem.

Carlin, who died almost a year ago has won five Grammies and his seven dirty words were a main focus of the U.S. Supreme Court case F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation in which the justices confirmed the government’s right to regulate public airwaves.

This video is from his last HBO Special "It’s Bad for Ya” for which the working title was “Parade of Bullshit”. It was filmed only four months before he died of heart failure at the age of 71. He was awarded a grammy for this show and the Mark Twain Prize for Humor posthumously.

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By M. Hannington

For more than 30 years I have meditated and practiced Hatha yoga.

Breathing in the joys of my life and blowing away the bad, the anger. I can relax my third eye, feel my other two (no longer needed) sink back in their sockets, and make my hands as lifeless as an empty pair of gloves. The breathe slows pushed gently in and out from the stomach, heart and pulse faint and stress streams away through the hips, thighs, then calves and out my toes.

In this state I feel a great connection to the Earth and everything on it. There is great peace in this knowledge - to know that my actions today will be felt and why the wisdom of this “Tao Te Ching” saying is so profound:

A good traveler has no fixed plans
and is not intent upon arriving.
A good artist lets his intuition
lead him wherever it wants.
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts
and keeps his mind open to what is.

Thus the Master is available to all people
And doesn’t reject anyone.
She is ready to use all situations
And doesn’t waste anything.
This is called embodying the light.

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man’s job?
If you don’t understand this, you will get lost,
however intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.

If you are going to explore you can't have a timetable, if you are going to learn you must throw away pre-conceived notions, and to really create is an instinctual process. If you are open to all things, you will automatically follow the right path and teach with your actions.

Lao-tzu, a contemporary of Confucius, wrote the Tao Te Ching in the sixth century and my copy is well worn, warped from long sessions spent with it and a steaming tub. Its translations are second in popularity to the bible and mine is a favorite by Stephen Mitchell. Tao means The Way and in 81 short chapters the book shows how the Master (a practitioner of the Tao) by doing nothing or wu wei accomplishes everything. It applies to raising children, sexual love, government, business, ecology, and just plain living.

What to make of an ancient book that at first glance seems to be offering as its main treatise a paradox?

Practice not doing,
and everything will fall into place.

Great athletes understand this concept better than anyone.

When a baseball player is on a hitting streak or golfer can’t miss, they refer to being in “The Zone”. They are no longer thinking about their swing or making adjustments, it just happens.

The same goes for artists. I didn’t really learn to draw until I stopped looking and DEFINING what was in front of my eyes, but let my hands reproduce what was REALLY there, the light and shadow.

It was a Zen Buddhist, a professor of life drawing that taught me his “way”. I would draw for hours and he would come and take my shammy cloth and wipe it away. It was the act of drawing life and not the drawing itself that was important. He taught us the patterns of life; how the wrist and the arm could draw perfect circles, that the study of anatomy was unnecessary to understanding the human form in a visual way.

No one person is the same.

His studio with its soft light, simplicity and hovering Japanese kites was one of the most peaceful places I have ever been.

In the 1980’s I was looking inward. My paintings were abstract expressions of what I was feeling. Expressed in horizontal and vertical lines and rendering my emotions into small areas of tension on a broad canvas. They would later become black paintings, where only texture and a slight shift in color or gloss whispered of my joy or darkness or pain.

The nineties were a huge period of growth; animation, technology, special effects and film let me explore and create in new ways that I’d never thought possible. Everything I had learned and studied in the eighties came into play for the first time. It was as if I could do anything I opened my mind to... in The Zone.

But I never forgot my minimalist past.

I was in San Francisco in 1992 and a married friend took me to a swank new bar that had the murals of some hot new Neo-Gauguinesque painter. They perhaps thought the hip, artsy place that they had discovered would impress me.

I wasn’t exactly comfortable there. My favorite hang at the time was Honest? John’s Bar and No Grill, which was run by former convict John Thompson and had missing linoleum tiles on the floor. A dump, but full of great characters and far more real than the opulent SF bar could ever be.

Not realizing I was being rude, I commented that I wasn’t into the new primitivist artist (flavor of the month) and at the moment I was still in love with Minimalism. The man’s wife was visibly crestfallen and my friend ridiculed my admiration of Ad Reinhardt, who I had discovered on a recent trip to MOMA in NYC.

"Oh no, not the man that does the black paintings?"

I could stare in marvel at those late 1960’s black paintings with their slight shifts in texture and tone. I completely understood his path to ever-simpler expressions. It was so like my own. He was one of the kindred spirits that shouted out to me and made me say, “Yes, he gets it!”

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

Ad Reinhardt’s minimalist path had taken him to painting a black square. To him the most nominal form of expression.

In following the Tao life is stripped of complications, in harmony with the world you can just be without trying. It is easier said than done and I'm on and off that path constantly - losing my way to find it again.

Never more than at this time have I felt more in sync with the world. Though I won’t see it in my time, it seems possible that one day the population of this tiny blue dot in space will stop struggling for what they can’t have and realize what is.

In reading the third chapter of the Tao Te Ching, I see for the first time, in what seems like eons, these principles being applied in America and it suddenly seems like a new world where anything is possible again.

If you over esteem great men,
people become powerless.
If you overvalue possessions,
people begin to steal.

The Master leads
by emptying people’s minds
and filling their cores,
by weakening their ambition
and toughening their resolve.
He helps people lose everything,
they know everything they desire,
and creates confusion
in those who think that they know.

Practice not-doing,
and everything will fall into place.

The above photographs were taken from the 3030 Press book "New Photography in China".

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You Tube Link

Sand Waves

When you listen to music you can imagine that each note is not only audible, but also has a physical effect. The same waves and patterns are a part of our daily life and seeing them visually makes them all the more magical.

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Forgetfulness

The former U. S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate reads his intelligently funny poem "Forgetfulness" The delightfully disappearing animation is by Julian Grey of Headgear.

The is from a series of animated poems produced by JWT-NY.

- - - - - -

The Poem - The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

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By M. Hannington

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The Road Not Taken
- Robert Frost


There is something about creative people – the need to share – to whisper or shout your thoughts. So intensely do the words, the visuals, the notes, swirl about the brain anxious of escaping in a form that has some meaning.

One can study an artist’s work and come to know how that person sees the world, their relation to it and sometimes even find themselves in it.

You can feel the sag in Picasso’s Blue Period and the uplift of his later, brighter cubist paintings.

Joy and despair leap from poet’s pens and the notes of a symphony, and almost all writers whether fiction, non-fiction or even sports writers tell you something of themselves.

And sometimes those writers can take you on a better, a more interesting path.

And paint a picture of their life and passions with words alone, so vivid that they become a reality in the mind.

And when that reality is met it becomes super real.

Start spreadin' the news, I'm leavin' today
I want to be a part of it, New York, New York
These vagabond shoes are longing to stray
Right through the very heart of it, New York, New York

New York, New York
- Frank Sinatra


In the heart of Manhattan, Central Park in a limo no less and I'm late to boot...

I reach the Aerie at 5:35PM there is just enough time for a delicious little snuggle with Scout and then we’re off to the Bronx. I’ve been up for 15 hours now, but the excitement quickly shoves any residual tiredness away.

We wedge ourselves onto a train and the bottom of Guru’s hood becomes a pillow for the entire ride. The car is as packed as a rush hour train, but this isn’t the nine to five crowd; it’s a game crowd. There are no empty iPod stares and you can feel a buzz running from pressed shoulders to hips.

For us two first timers it is even more so.

The train ride may be familiar to Matt, but there are so many firsts going on here!

Regurgitated by the open doors of the train, then trapped by a finicky metro card reader and I lose him for a second and panic.

Then I think to myself “Fuck you CAN’T lose Guru, it’s near to impossible.”

And there he is, beaming.

We enter the stadium, one by one, two virgins. Pop. Pop. Now, filthy and despoiled we are in the grasp of the new girl in town. And she’s so beautiful and Matt is so clearly smitten and he can’t stop staring at every inch of her.

This ain’t a date it’s a threesome and anyone that knows Guru realizes that you have to share him.

For at the heart of the woman he so clearly loves is a team and not even Natalie Portman could pry him away from the Yankees (well, maybe for a quickie during a slow inning, but he’d STILL peak at the field).

And it’s not just the two of us, who are swept up with her glamorous charm.

City dwellers never look up. It’s the same way in Detroit. I’m an exception being a bit of an architecture nut and I notice this trait in every city I have been in. So imagine my delight at seeing thousands of city dwellers gazing at their surroundings in amazement.

She feels ancient, she feels new, Amazonian and impressive and you get the feeling it will take multiple trips for her to become completely au courant to the fans. It is like that first trip into Notre Dame in Paris or Westminster Abbey in London with all its famous memorials.

Hallowed, but yet she is glisteningly new.

Guru's joy is infectious and we thread swifty through the crowd like anxious teenagers at a concert, only stopping for the national anthem, but so bedazzled is he by the sight of the field he has to ask me where the flag is.

I flew into to New York seated in row thirteen and I would fly out of New York seated in this same row. I would watch the game from row 13. It was not tempting fate, my destiny never felt more firmly in my grasp.

When towards the end of the evening as a light mist hits the heights of the ballpark we occupy and the score is not what is wished, I whisper, “It is early yet.”

I didn’t come 432 miles to see the Yankees lose. I came 432 miles to share in one man’s passion for a game. I had brought along every ounce of good karma I own. I KNEW they’d win.

And they did.

Baseball!

To grok and be grokked.

Thanks Guru for letting me be a part of it.

It was swell.

To read the whole series click here.

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To think of time—of all that retrospection!
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward.

Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue?
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?


Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing?
If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing.


To think that the sun rose in the east! that men and women were flexible, real, alive–that everything was alive!
To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear our part!
To think that we are now here, and bear our part.

To Think of Time - Walt Whitman

Posted by M. Hannington at 06:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

You Tube Link

Spider-Man

Alain Robert (born as Robert Alain Philippe on 7 August 1962) is a French rock climber from Digoin, Saône-et-Loire, Bourgogne, famous for climbing tall buildings (85 in total), which he scales at the crack of dawn because the authorities refuse to give him permission to take such risks.

Alain has reached the top of the Sears Tower, the 75 foot high Luxor Obelisque in Place de la Concorde, France and the 1,667 foot Tapei One in a legally allowed climb and has also attempted the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lampur, but was arrested on the 60th floor. He now climbs to raise awareness for global warming and in 2009 during the G 20 summit climbed to the 9th floor of the Lloyd's building, rolling out a 100ft banner stating that there were only 100 months left to save the planet.

He has fallen twice from a height of 14 feet and once was thought too handicapped to climb again, but has since challenged himself by climbing increasingly more difficult structures. As you can see from the way he trains at home, he has earned his moniker of Spider-Man.

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By M. Hannington

The thunderclap was so loud that I exclaimed, “Aah!” and shivers ran across my body.

An instinctual fear?

It’s three o’ clock in the morning and I’m already up.

We are hosting one of those spring storms that is full of electricity and when I open the front and back doors of the house for a delicious cross breeze I can feel the hairs standing on end. The thunder rumbles on and on never seeming to stop reverberating, flashing lights everywhere and the tip tap sound of the rain is both sharp and soft in the distance.

It drowns out the thrum of the cars on Jefferson Ave.

And two weeks and 482 miles seems like a long way away…

Though the memories are not far. They are here, mixing with the sound of the rain and floating on the cool moist breeze that has cleared my mind of the myriad tasks of the day and let it wander where it will.

I have a few MIRL (google it) experiences under my belt, but none of them have been quite like this last one.

In Manhattan with Guru... talking politics, life, ponies and of course baseball. Face to face for the first time and most of all enjoying the freedom to be that comes with understanding.

Quite often when it’s early I slip up to the corner gas station to grab a vitamin water and sooth a craving.

There I spend some time with the shy, handsome Hispanic cashier, who calls me sweetie or sweetheart and covers me when I’m short a dime and gets paid back the next time. I talk to the folks hanging at the bus stop, who I share cigarettes with or my change and tales of life.

This morning is much like my last sleepless night in Manhattan, in the rain, a coat covering my pajamas, hanging with the folks on the street.

The purpose of my trip to New York was threefold. I have been talking to Guru and Red Sox Steve for quite some time and we have important ventures to discuss.

Secondly, I need a break from Ms. 91, who can’t stop being a mother and the tensions of one of Slouch’s rewrites (now over) that set him on edge and that leave me with little support around this now busy household – I’m exhausted.

Third, I have been talking to Guru for over a year, almost daily, we are confidantes, we understand each other, we have accomplished a lot together, so shouldn’t we consummate the relationship with some sort of human ritual?

Be it pressing two bloody fingertips together, high-fiving or just squeezing the living crap out of each other.

There would be no kicking of asses, not this time Ms. Jane, but I did get in a few pinches.

All of it is familiar…

The brick wall of the Aerie, the images and Scout, who I’m sure has been told several times that I was coming and is there eager to greet me.

Dear sweet loveable Scout. Next time I bring my dog brush!

I have a few emails to dash off and Guru has my work area all mapped out for me.

We settle in like we have always worked together in the same room, but we haven’t. This is the time of morning that I’m putting last minute touches on VG.com and answering emails and Matt is doing his work and I know that, but usually we’re 482 miles apart.

Before I know it I’m surrounded and I slough off the rest of my work and commune. Mr. Biggles has hopped up next to me, Scout is at my feet and Jen Jen is letting me know it is playtime by sinking her claws into my knee and almost making me drop my laptop.

We hit the subway, take the slow walk that is Chester... When Red Sox Steve shows up, it’s a typical day in the Aerie and I feel like I have been sitting in that corner for years.

Guru and Red Sox Steve (Speedy to me) have an evil plan over the next few days to wear me down with four story walk-ups and maneuvering various dogs around neighborhood streets.

What these fellows don’t know is that laundry at my house involves multiple trips from the upstairs to the basement, not to mention I wheel around a 168 pound woman three times a week from the car to the upstairs class and then down into the basement locker room and then into the pool and back to the car again in a YMCA that takes up a city block.

Despite the constant teasing from the Y ladies in their various stages of undress, I manage a pretty effective workout at the locker room sinks while Ms. 91 changes into swim wear and again when she showers. Her class time I spend in the lounge, it is the only me-time I get all week, that and early mornings like this one.

And I do her laundry now too and I also walk a lot.

Speedy is young and like the young he doesn’t always approach life with a plan. Where Matt and I understand that minutes are precious.

I want to take the transverse road through Central Park, but Speedy cuts in early and we meander around dusty paths. I’m sweltering in my jacket and hoodie, but thankful that we have swapped backpacks and he is the one suffering under the load of my camera gear and tightly packed clothes.

The result of our journey and the nice long chat is that we come out at 90th rather than 87th where the hotel is, but it only adds three blocks and I’m not the one with the heavy backpack after all.

After spending three days with these two gentlemen (and they are) I already had a routine. Mornings at the Hot & Crusty, where a cheese croissant and a large coffee cost only $3.09, long walks and short cab rides that leave you feeling HOT and CRUSTY at the end of the day.

There was glee and there was sadness, things I’ve only heard or read before, but now will forever see. Memories that are no longer just voices, but faces too.

And Guru would say "Kewel!"

The first day was the longest one, almost 24 hours without sleep and an uncommon moment in time I’ll never forget. It was the day that Matt and I met the new girl in town.

Hang around and I may just tell you about it…

To read Part III click here.

On Sunday's Life in the Aerie I'll publish a series of my recent NYC photographs entitled "Compression", in this vein I hope to continue to explore new ways of looking at things both in my city and NYC, a city I cherish even more for those I know in it.

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By M. Hannington

Ms. 91 plops down at 7:30AM and when I enter the room from the kitchen where I’ve started my spring cleaning. I'm greeted with...

“You’re late!”

What’d you mean I’m late?

“You’re usually up earlier.”

There is a lot of assuming going on here.

She is assuming that because I’m not in my office that I must be sleeping and because I’m in my office at the computer in the mornings when I work on VG.com from 5:00AM to 7:00AM and again at lunch and also at the end of the day when she again ventures from her room to watch her shows, she assumes that I’m always at the computer.

She tells her friends...

“My daughter’s always on that damn computer!”

Every morning she gets up for her breakfast and her Nasonex. I spray the latter into each nostril for her because she is unable to tell if she is doing it right. She is hard of hearing and can’t listen for the sound of the spray going in.

Almost every morning it’s the same. She’ll say, “I need my Naprocin.” Why she calls the Nasonex this I have no idea. I don’t think she has ever taken Naprocin in her life. Maybe it’s a memory from days gone by, before I knew evertything about her medical history, prescriptions and the ins and outs of Medicare and insurance.

Of course she also calls my brother's dog Zippy, Iffy. Long a trouble maker, for which my two Goldens always took the blame, this amuses me to no end.

Because she is taking Synthroid, a drug that causes constipation, she drinks prune juice every other day, but this morning she wants Mylanta.

I ask her if she has an upset stomach?

“No I don't have an upset stomach!”

Mylanta is for upset stomachs Mom.

“Let me see that!”

I hand her the bottle and ask, “Do you have diarrhea?”

“No I have the opposite problem!” and “You gave me something liquid before, I thought it was Mylanta”

“You mean Milk of Magnesia?”

“No!”

“Do you mean Metamucil? It’s what the doctor wanted you to take.”

“Is it a liquid?”

“No you mix it with water.”

“Oh alright.”

Upon receiving this however she is still convinced that what I have given her in the past for constipation was liquid Mylanta and she is clearly not happy with my choice. Why the normal prune juice is not an option she clearly is unwilling to discuss with me.

She hacks up phlegm into a Kleenex while she’s sitting with me and let’s me spray stuff up her nose, but when it comes to the other end she refuses to discuss any further the state of her constipation.

Ah me.

On Saturdays she calls her friends and because of her hearing she is LOUD. Here is what she says to them.

“Well you know Mary doesn’t do enough around here. Her yard has dandelions.”

I have an idea Mom let’s skip the YMCA Monday and you can watch me pull dandelions instead.

“This isn’t the ideal situation for me. I could do my own laundry, but this house is no damn good and the laundry room is in the basement.”

You could also wash your own dishes, but I haven’t seen that happen.

Then she brings up the pills. The sleeping pills she had been keeping in her bedside drawer, until that is we moved her up here and now no one knows where they are. She doesn’t know if there were enough to do the trick anyway.

She is telling this to her sister, who will almost certainly die from pancreatic cancer and whom my mom, being much older, wishes she could trade places with.

We have talked about all of this before, not prolonging her life unnecessarily, how I have a friend in the Hemlock Society and if Ms. 91's life became unbearable I would call her.

I hope that this never happens because I don't know if I'm really brave enough, but I also know I couldn't bear to see her suffer.

That advances in pain control and hospice care have given me options other than a Socratic one are what I hang my hat on, but I understand how she feels. If I were to lose my eyes or my hands and no longer be able to create? I couldn't bear life either.

These blue periods come and go with Ms. 91. This one merely frustration over not being able to take care of her bodily functions without her daughter's help.

Tomorrow is Mother's Day and she will be in her glory. I'll help her with her jewelry and she'll put on something nice and off we'll go off to lunch, where even though she knows she shouldn't, she'll eat far too much.

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You Tube Link

Wild Is The Wind

Listening to this song gives me shivers...

David Bowie is one of the most influential musicians of this last century, surviving 40 decades, while constantly reinventing himself to fit the music of the scene, yet somehow still managing stand out amongst the rest. This 1981 video directed by long-time collaborator David Mallet in its stark black and white and slowly moving circle emphasizes and seemingly isolates the strength and emotion of Bowie's voice.

"Wild Is the Wind" is a song written by Dimitri Tiompkin and Ned Washington. The track was originally recorded by Johnny Mathis for the 1956 film Wild Is the Wind, and later covered by Nina Simone on the album Wild Is The Wind in 1966.

David Bowie recorded his version of the song in 1976 for his album Station to Station.

In December of 2008 MOMA held a one-time retrospective of Bowie videos assembled by MoMA Associate Curator Barbara London and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. The list is below complete with their links on You Tube.

“John I’m Only Dancing” (1972). Directed by Mick Rock. 2:49 min.

“Jean Genie” (1972). Directed by Mick Rock. 4:02 min.

“Life on Mars?” (1973). Directed by Mick Rock. 3:55 min.

“Heroes” (1977). Directed by Stanley Dorfman. 3:27 min.

“DJ” (1979). Directed by David Mallet. 3:58 min.

“Ashes to Ashes” (1980). Directed by David Mallet & David Bowie. 3:33 min.

“China Girl” (1983). Directed by David Mallet & David Bowie. 4:03 min.

“Blue Jean” (1984). Directed by Julien Temple. 3:17 min.

“As the World Falls Down” (1986). Directed by Steve Barron. 3:41 min.

“Fame 90″ (1990). Directed by Gus Van Sant. Edited by Edouard Lock. 3:33 min.

“Jump They Say” (1993). Directed by Mark Romanek. 4:00 min.

“The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” (1995). Directed by Sam Bayer. 4:58 min.

“Dead Man Walking” (1997). Directed by Floria Sigismondi. 3:49 min.

“I’m Afraid of Americans” (1997). Directed by Dom & Nic. 4:25 min.

“Survive” (1999). Directed and produced by Walter Stern. 3:29 min.

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By M. Hannington

...she walks into the one he can't find.

It was the last thing I bought in New York, a Yankees hat. Purchased for sentimental reasons and not because I was suddenly a fan, that was to happen for one night only.

My Tigers and the Yankees have always had hard fought battles never seeming to be able to completely dominate the other, but the Tigers, who are now 919-1032-10 versus the Yanks historically, are on the losing end. That is, except at the CoPa where we’ve kept it close at 19-20.

I know all too well that you don’t disrespect the Yankees around Guru and today I was in Guru’s town, planning to see Guru’s team. I was more than willing to root for the home team, but what I didn’t realize, and maybe should have, was how easy that would turn out to be.

You see, I know everything about Guru. You might say I’m a Vagabond Guru expert!

Despite never meeting, I can easily draw the shape of his head.

Tell you about his childhood sweethearts.

Because I know his deepest secrets and he knows mine.

Sometimes I think I know him better than I know myself, but that doesn’t matter because through Matt I’ve gotten to know myself better too. I think he’d say the same.

I’m Yin to his Yang. I see pictures - he sees words, he’s big - I’m little, he’s explosive - I’m calm, and I’m digital - he’s definitely analog.

He talks – I listen, but when it matters he listens too.

We also have a great deal in common: Our southern past, our hopes for the future, we take care of our Moms, we take care of the animals in our separate worlds and they in turn take care of us.

We have been in many of the same places, but at different times.

He once asked if I “grokked” him so well that he had nothing else to tell me. The answer to that would be, yes and no.

When I hit the Manhattan pavement I’m already in sync with the city. I have never understood the laissez-faire motions of the West Coast types I have worked with and the ambling ways of southern folks.

I need to move, to go, to get it done…

It’s only 5 short blocks to the Aerie from where the cab had dropped me and I’m here in no time. This is Guru’s neighborhood and it’s familiar territory, though I may have never been here before, in my mind and through Matt’s words, I already had.

I called Guru and Red Sox Steve, three blocks ago to let them know I'm here.

I’m a vagabond until 2:00PM when I can check into the hotel and I’m carrying everything I need on my back. Failing to raise anyone by phone I slip into a little store that can barely accommodate me with my load. Instantly finding the Vitamin Water I down everyday, but it is so snug inside that I have to make a U-turn at the very back to be able to make my way round to the register.

There is a beautiful little park and I set up shop there.

I knew when I met him for the first time he’d squeeze the life out of me, he did. I knew I’d get a big smack right on the lips and if I didn’t he would of gotten one from me.

Great friends, be they man or woman always get my full frontal affection.

That Guru and I, such kindred spirits, who managed to find each other in the great sea of the internet, suddenly discover when only blocks away the task has become difficult?

This doesn’t surprise me at all.

He says “You’re here!” and “I didn’t know you were coming so early.”

Despite the fact that I had sent an itinerary, I’m on Guru’s schedule now and I know full well what that means.

Twenty minutes… Off comes the leather jacket, Detroit was 43º in the wee hours that I left it and Manhattan is nearing 60º. I stretch, have a look around, there is nary a head floating around the surrounding sidewalks that even remotely matches.

Twenty more minutes… It’s Guru on the phone.

“Where are you?”

“90th and 2nd Ave.”

“Oh, I’m at the park on 92nd.. See you in a minute!”

So that was how Vagabond Guru and I met. In a park, only blocks away from his world...

And it was like finding my favorite shoes, the ones that have been missing for a long, long time.

Delightful.

I would soon see his world and those that are in it and another park that is like none that I have ever seen before, but that story is best told on another day...

To read Part II click here.

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We (a small group, not quite sure who) were in a theater, but we were sitting on the railing of a balcony (more like a box), facing away from the stage.  (Stage represents "real life"??!)  On this balcony floor a creature is writhing around -- sort of like a salamander or some many-bodied version of one, going through all sorts of contortions, changing colors, reeling, writhing and metamorphosing in a quite upsetting way.  (How I've got all my loved ones and friends to turn away from what's really going on and gaze at my unseemly midlife agonies.)

This dream was shared with me by a friend, fifty-one, who had been intensely depressed and had just started taking hormones.  By "real life" and "what's really going on," my friend evidently meant her urgent responsibilities to her job and family members -- the performance onstage, the sense of "the show must go on" that ironically peaks just at this time of "quite upsetting" metamorphosis.

Welcome to the Dark Wood.

To me, that name is far more evocative of what we go through to get from youth to middle age than our pedestrian "midlife crisis."  It comes from a masterwork by a poet of a certain age:

In the middle of this journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For the right way was lost . . .

Those are the opening lines of Dante's Inferno, written in midlife and in exile almost seven hundred years ago.  Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) had literally been thrown out of Florence, the home of his proud political youth, and into the wilderness.  But you don't have to lose your worldly standing -- job, home, marriage -- to feel downcast and bewildered by the changes in your body, the realization of your mortality, the departure of your children, and perhaps most of all, the vanishing of the mirage of arrival that you've been striving toward all your life.  For Dante, these two experiences of exile became one, and it sent him on a quest for the spiritual foundations of life and the deeper justice of the universe that became The Divine Comedy.  That's why he says of the Dark Wood:

So bitter it is, death is hardly more so;
Yet there was good there . . .

You'll know your own Dark Wood when you get there by the deathly gloom and the disappearance of the path.  This is a place that calls in question everything you've lived for -- the dreams you've fulfilled just as much as the ones you haven't.  For instance, my childlessness haunts me, yet I see that having children has not spared my friends and siblings the same haunting emptiness.  Success and failure both lead here; all roads converge and vanish in the Dark Wood.  You may be lost in it for quite a while or only briefly, but even a short stay feels endless while it lasts.  And you may wander in and out of it several times over several years.  There's nothing you can do during those times but keep on going, in the hope that eventually a glimmer of light, a signpost, or a guide will appear.  As Dante's own guide, the ghost of the Classical poet Virgil, told him, "The way out is the way through."

The tricky part is, you have to live in the Dark Wood and the real world simultaneously.  What you're doing may never have seemed so futile or nonsensical, yet it has never been more important that you do it.  People -- adolescent children, frail parents, colleagues, clients, students -- are depending on you.  (These days, even infants or toddlers may be depending on you -- a defiance of nature's timetable that exacts a high price in exhaustion.)  You are one of the pillars of their world, so you can't let them know that the whole human enterprise sometimes strikes you as a) hopeless, b) pointless, c) ridiculous.  And then there's your weary duty to yourself:  the dread that this is your last chance to prove you're not a has-been (if you have been) or a failure (if you haven't), to insure that you won't end up murmuring "Rosebud" or living on cat food.

These are not objective truths about your situation.  (Your last chance?  Not likely.)  These are the death throes of your youth.  And it may be only those absurd, burdensome responsibilities that hold you firmly in place and get you through.  As you hold them up, you are upheld by the young, who are still enchanted by life, and the old or sick, who are just glad to be alive.  Meanwhile, what's dying in you feels like your soul, but it's only (!) your fantasies.  (Who knew fantasy was so intimately entwined with the purpose and the love of life?)

No one in our own time understood the Dark Wood so well, or spoke of it so bluntly, as the great psychologist C.G. Jung:

Once the parental transferences and the youthful illusions have been mastered, or are at least ripe for mastery, then we must speak of these things. . . . We are no longer concerned with how to remove the obstacles to a man's profession, or to his marriage, or to anything that means a widening of his life, but are confronted with the task of finding a meaning that will enable him to continue living at all -- a meaning more than blank resignation and mournful retrospect.

Whew!  The man didn't mince words, and he obviously had been there -- and lived to tell the tale. In fact, both Jung and Dante ultimately succeeded in "finding a meaning" that enabled them not only to go on living, but to create their greatest work.  (So much for last chances!)  Only after being painfully stripped of youth's desires, ambitions, and illusions could they fully spread their souls' wings.  If they hadn't done time in the Dark Wood, we might hardly even have heard of them.  So take heart:  the darkness that can close in around your 50th birthday (give or take a year or two) isn't a coffin, it's a chrysalis.

If you braced for the big midlife bummer around your 40th, though, you're apt to be pleasantly surprised -- and lulled into a false sense of security.  We've pushed back the Dark Wood by a good decade, but that doesn't mean we've clearcut it.  The trouble is, the only maps we have of the life cycle are the old ones, and they're outdated and misleading.  As I hit 40, I had vivid memories of my father and his best friend mourning that milestone over a bottle of Jack Daniels. the Prozac of the World War II set.  I'd grown up with their generation's bad jokes about how "Life begins at forty" (yeah, right) and "Is there sex after forty?"  And I'd read that Dante, exiled at 37, wrote about being lost in a dark wood when he was 41 or 43.  (But Dante was 56 when he died -- and Jung was 86, as many more of us will live to be.)  So I was prematurely prepared for the worst.  When, instead, I found myself in the lush coda of youth that is now the early 40s, it induced a mild delusion that I'd never have to grow any older, and could stay in this sexy state of suspended animation forever -- which only made the badlands on the far side of 45 all the more of a shock.

To give you a slightly better idea of what to expect in the wilds of midlife, here's my sketch for a new map of the territory.  Your expedition will probably take a somewhat different route, but I think you'll still recognize the landscape:

The absolute peak of life: age 34  Why 34?  Because while your body has already started downhill at that age, unless you're a total couch potato or a professional athlete, the decline is negligible.  (I was 34 when I got my black belt in karate.)  Your mind, meanwhile, is still on its way up.  Never again will the two of them be together at such a high altitude.  (But then, neither of them has wings.)  A few years later, the afterglow of that summit is just beginning to fade.  You're entering . . .

The old age of youth:  37-44, a time when the faint chill of lengthening shadows can make your life's fire flare up in scary, exciting way.  It can be a dangerous age, right around forty -- your last crack at being young, with all the potency, fertility, and folly that implies.  Whatever earthly good you've always dreamed of -- the brass ring, authentic passion, a great adventure, a baby -- now is when you may make a lunge for it, putting mature powers at the service of defiant youthful desires.   It can be a time of daring business schemes, marriage-shattering love affairs, impassioned quests to conceive or adopt.  There's a lot of hot-dogging on those steepening slopes.

And yet, at least for a woman -- despite the shrilling biological alarm clock and the alleged lottery odds of finding a mate -- the early forties can be the best of times.  What you've lost in dewy freshness, you more than make up for in kick-ass confidence; you can still turn a man's head, but you've thrown off the chains of male approval.  Sexiness, independence, power, maybe even still fertility:  you've got it all.  If only we could stop the clock, this is when I would have done it.

But we can't.  The aging process has the most astonishing inexorability.  Helpless as a leaf on a river, exclaiming "How can this be happening to me?", you're swept right past "Wait!  That's enough!" and into the rapids of the death of youth:  45-51.

Somewhere along that stretch awaits the Dark Wood.

My dreams, deeply impressed by that image from Dante, kept asking, "Are we there yet?"  But as long as I could still cling to the remnants of youth, they found nothing more menacing in midlife than some beat-up furniture:

[Age 44]  Carrying, with another woman, an old scarred dark wood table into the next room for someone.  The next room was a desert landscape with high dune cliffs, which we happily fell over and slid down, table and all.  The cliffs were covered with glossy, heavy yellow satin, the kind with a gliding, gleaming surface so slippery it feels wet. . . . [After leaving and returning], to my disappointment, the landscape had been turned into a room; the desert cliffs had been hidden away behind wallboard. . . . I decided to climb anyway, tried to pull out drawers of a dark wood dresser to stand on, found them too brittle, like orange crates, coudln't get up.

As my late forties wore on, dream after dream was set in some ironic, and often rather grand, indoor version of Dante's wilderness:  [45]  "A big, shadowy loft -- old dark wood.""  [48]  "Staying in some sort of dark-wood dormitory/mansion."  [48]  "In a hotel, at the top of a glamorously dim dark-wood staircase."  In one dream at 49, I flew into a rage and smashed up some of that damned dark-wood furniture!  But not until after turning 50 did I get there for real:

[Age 51]  There was a party.  I was in a house with girls -- sisters?  They were going to the party.  I had to stay home and work.  But then I went out and tried to find my way.  Right, left . . . down, into a dim wild forest which was both awesome and deathly -- very rugged rocky path, huge shafts of redwood trees, but all very still and jumbled and monochrome, as if covered with dust or ash or graphite, or "metal dust" from a lathe.  I was dressed for the party, in high heels, clambering down, down to the "bottom" -- a gorge or cleft between steep slopes -- all in this ashy twilight gray. . . .

And again:

I looked up at towering trees as massive as redwoods, but that seemed to be dead; they had spiderweb hanging from them like Spanish moss.  Everything was monochrome, like an engraving; the place had an Underworld feel to it, a forest of the shades.  It was supposed to be a familiar place I was returning to.

Months after my dreams guided me down to that desolate place, I came across almost its exact image in Gustave Doré's engravings for Dante's Inferno.  But by then, a final dream had made its meaning clear.

[Age 51]  I had an amazing dream:  that my twin had died.  As she was carried out on a stretcher, covered with a very white sheet, I saw the dark top of her head.  She had no gray hair.  I didn't particularly want to see her (me) dead, but someone pulled the sheet back from her face.  Her eyes were a little swollen and gummed shut.

What's strange is that the whiteness of the sheet puts a positive spin on it.  It strikes me that the sheet was as bright white as the walls next door [an adjoining studio that I had just renovated and repainted].  So funny to see that paint job, which makes me so happy, as the shroud over my youth.  Renewal as finality.  She is my young self, definitely -- the enormous rearrangement of my whole way of thinking sometimes feels so extreme it's as if I'm becoming an entirely different person than I was. So now that process is complete and she's being carried out.



Maybe her eyes are stuck shut because she didn't want to see.

Amba has been a freelance critic, writer and author since 1969, has written for nearly every major women's magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Village Voice and The Nation.
Ambivablog

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You Tube Link

Forest Love

This Greenpeace campaign which aims to encourage the EU to stop the importation of illegal timber was featured on the O'Reilly Factor last summer.

Says a Greenpeace spoke person, "It's safe to say that Bill O'Reilly is probably not a fan of Greenpeace. So when our video, along with the entire campaign pitch were mentioned on his show, and the worse things he had to say about it were "salacious" and "this disturbs me", we were quite surprised. So here's something I never thought I would write: Thanks Bill, for helping us out."

We may never see trees in the same way again.

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By M. Hannington

This one needs no pictures...

It’s the internet slang a child molester sometimes uses to lure a victim to meet them.

It means, meet me in real life.

We’ve all had to the urge to see someone. We’ve called up friends and said, “Let’s get together, it’s been too long.”

BUT an internet friend is not a real friend right?

Is it possible to really know someone using only verbal communication?

Can you hear pain in an email? Can you hear joy?

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;



And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

When You Are Old – William Butler Yeats

Can it be as powerful as a poem? The words in an email?

Sometimes people don’t really hear.

Sometimes people don’t really see.

And sometimes when you slow down, soften the pace and look. You will see...

The worried mom’s face, the happy dogs playing, the man who’s been broken and the one who is still struggling to be…

He said “Do you have another cigarette sister?”

Sure.

“Thanks sis!”

And sometimes you can go to a place countless times and suddenly it will never be the same.

And sometimes the sadness in a face, just confirms it is there.

I had an adventure in Manhattan that made me see it for the first time, not just in my eyes, but in all those eyes I met for the first time.

You’ll hear more about it here soon.

To read Part I click here.

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By M. Hannington

I bleed. I can staunch the flow, twas only a small blow.

YOU bleed and I’ll clean the wound? They bleed and I moan.

All your stuff in tow, can’t keep everything YOU own.

A single mother weeps you know, down in the hood, go.

Red bleeding

White healing

I wash the dripping blood from off of YOU.

Oh the bruises, man, yeah they’re blue so blue.

Americans are nervous about how he’ll serve us.

The mother gets on her bus, she works hard but…

YOU look down at her, at her boyfriend who battered.

To YOU it don’t matter, look at the blood that you spattered!

Bible-thumping

Anti-humping

Do YOU even know how babies are born?

Do it and then cover your eyes in scorn?

Red blood on my white skin, red blood on yours darkened.

I drive in my old car, no work and it’s seems far…

The bruises and a deep scar, the blue bruises on America.

It’s just like they hit you, like your old man that whipped you.

14K Curtain

Fuck hurtin'

I'll be back that's for certain and POW that's for her man

YOU fuckers from back then, shut up can't you listen?

Our blood's in your oil wells, your don't ask, your don't tell.

Tortured prisoner's in a prison cell, made this place a living hell.

What don't YOU think? Well? Your moronic stink, while... Ow!

He bashes in her skull and YOU scream that the DOW fell?

Red bleeding

White healing

I wash the dripping blood from off of YOU.

Oh the bruises, man, yeah they’re blue so blue.

There was a 74% percent increase from 2004 to 2005 alone in domestic violence incidents in Detroit, where existing shelters for women are over crowded and area hotlines are flooded with calls. On March 27, 2009 Armenta White was found dead in her apartment after her boyfriend called 911 to report he had strangled her. White's son was found alone next to his dead mother, who was laying face down on the floor. They had moved to Detroit from Louisville to try and make a fresh start in what was only a four month relationship.

Crime experts state that the recent economic woes in Michigan have caused a sharp rise in domestic violence. Michigan is one of several states where a man convicted of spousal murder receives a lighter sentence than a man murdering a complete stranger.

From 2001 to 2006 seven black prostitutes were found dead in abandoned buildings in Detroit. Left naked to die with their legs spread open after being beaten in the head with bricks, chunks of cement and in one case a chair leg. On Wednesday, March 07, 2007, Shelly Andre Brooks was found guilty of first-degree murder for a 2002 murder and faces charges for five of the other women.

In 2004 former President George W. Bush cut the Clintons COPS program, which provides grants for state and local agencies to hire police officers, from $499 million to $22 million. These programs also helped fund shelters for battered woman in many states.

Editor's Note: No women were abused in the creation of this article.

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You Tube Link

Gathering Storm

This rather inept video was produced and broadcast for what is claimed to be a 1.5 million dollar budget by the National Organization for Marriage. Rather than being frightened by its lightning and thunder, it seems folks are parodying the piece all over You Tube and even Stephen Colbert has done a version of the anti-gay video in which lightening from the "gay storm" hits an Arkansas teacher causing him to become gay.

Run by right-wing, Princeton professor, Robert George and columnist and co-author of "The Case for Marriage", Maggie Gallagher (she was recently caught receiving taxpayers' money to promote the marriage initiatives of the Bush administration), NOM formed in 2007.

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Hot Country Girl Has A Message For The Troops

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By M. Hannington

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

“You know this is just stupid!” I said to myself. Ms. 91 has been going off (as she does) for the past two days about what we are doing for Easter. Last week it was taxes, before that my lack of a broom closet and THANK GOD her obsession with the crevice tool and the vacuum seems to have ended. Unfortunately, with CNN constantly spurring it on, her mania for Michelle Obama may never end.

Anyways, I evoke God’s name all the time, it is a figure of speech that I’m actually trying to rid myself of. It shocked my childhood Alabama friends that I would take the Lord’s name in vain and so often! But all the kiddies in the Detroit suburb I had move to from the deep-south did so all the time. It was Oh God this and Oh God that, in every other sentence.

I’m not the kind of person that talks to God or prays, so it seems to me that using phrases like "Thank God!". “God damn it!” or “Jesus Christ!” (sometimes I use “Cheese and Rice!”) seem hypocritical or at least ironic.

I don’t really think Jesus perks up and says “Huh? What is the matter with Mary this time?”

“Cheese and Rice!” probably comes from a long-time relationship with a Jewish man whose mother preferred he didn’t go around evoking Jesus. There is really no one around me, except the Church Lady, who cares whether I say “Jesus Christ” all the time, so to use the phrase “Cheese and Rice” just seems silly.

I also don’t think God will damn the stupid knob on my stove that keeps falling off and after all it is unfair to ask her to because if I spent 5 minutes to glue the thing on it wouldn’t happen. In fact, I would stop writing and glue it on right now, but I can’t seem to find it!

I do yoga, I meditate, I read the philosophers, the Tao de Ching and even biblical passages, and I’m fascinated with the Kabbalah, so I’m not completely irreligious. I have a sense that there is a power in this world that can be tapped into and when I feel most connected to this force amazing things happen.

That Jesus rode around on dinosaurs and was the son of some bearded man named God that lives in the sky surrounded by beautiful haloed women with wings and who created the entire universe out of some clay is just too much of a fairy tale for me. That the Virgin Mary somehow manages to stamp her image on a piece of toast thereby causing a miracle is too tough for me to swallow (er, bite into).

I went to a Presbyterian Sunday school and church, attended Lutheran services with a childhood friend. I have been invited to temple, a born again service where several members held my hands, forming a circle and talked about Moody Blues songs and acid trips where they saw Jesus, Unitarian churches, Baptist churches, Methodist churches, Catholic churches and even some naturalistic service held in the woods.

By far the services I enjoyed the most were the Jewish ones because they just seemed so practical. Though the Unitarian’s music DID rock. In every other church service I attended the pastor, minister, bishop or the guy in the woods, all would stand up and say “This is what God meant…” and I would say to myself “How do you know?”

Maybe it’s just me, but I have a problem with people who tell me I ought to look at things their way and there is no need to look at any other ideas because THEY have got it right. Because most organized religions tend to do this (I won't get into the sometimes distasteful business aspects) I long ago left them behind.

I not anti-church per se, they do great things in my community. In fact, if it weren't for me, the Iroquois Christ Lutheran Church wouldn't have a new roof. Of course the movie I was working on and the scenes we filmed there involved group sex and a virgin losing her virginity, but no one will ever recognize the church in them. They ended up with a nice chunk of change in location fees and I'm going to finish up some of their plasterwork for them because they are such nice folks.

That said; don't even get me started on the dude that saw Jesus while on an acid trip. I know a woman that was too afraid to get off a piano bench because she thought the floor was made of lava and she's not hunting around for mysterious volcanoes these days. God created the entire universe and some guy under a tree talking about rocks knows exactly what God meant in a Bible written by men, albeit men inspired by God, thousands of years ago because he is inspired too? Can it really be that simple?

According to the Kabbalists, God is infinity and unknowable. Their complicated system of four worlds beginning with Azilut or Light of which the lower worlds Yitzirah, Beriyah, and Asiyah descended and these worlds with their ten sephirot Chochmah (Wisdom), Binah (Understanding), Chesed (Mercy), Gevurah (Justice), Tiferet (Harmony), Netzach (Victory), Hod (Glory), Yesod (Power) and Malchut (Kingdom) all emanations of God that reveal his will, are a least so complicated you can spend a lifetime studying the literature and learning Gematria, Notarikon and Temurah, which are methods for unlocking further secret meanings in the ancient texts.

So when I said to myself today "...this is just stupid!" it was because Ms. 91 who suddenly has an urge to celebrate Easter is the biggest heathen of us all.

At one time she took care of her mother and her mother, a long standing Catholic, became a Jehovah's Witness. That she did so because she wanted the attention she got from the constantly visiting congregation didn't matter, what did is her holding it over Ms. 91's head. "When I get to heaven I'm going to be 31 years old and have my beautiful long brown hair back and you won't!" she'd say to my mom.

So Ms. 91 became a religious scholar, she studied the religions of the world for a year and I too have read those books from her classes on Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism. And after a year of classes and study she decided that the human race was nuts.

Here is her rant:

"A heaven filled with beautiful virgins? Come on! There is no way Noah could have put two of every animal on a boat. Impossible. Walking on water, parting the Red Sea...Lazarus rising from the dead? He was probably in a coma! My friends down south all think that Daddy is in heaven waiting for me. It's ridiculous. When your dead, your dead and that's that!"

She remembers going to confession, but can't think of what a poor farm girl like her could possible have had to confess. She can remember eighty years ago when she took communion and felt so holy and she remembers the handsome Catholic priest named Father Splinter. She can't imagine ever feeling like that again...

Yet here she is on the phone with her sister going on about whether I will bake a ham, or maybe we will go out and how I'm so last minute and haven't made any Easter plans at all yet.

Ironic isn't it?

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By M. Hannington

One of the most important things I've learned in life is patience. It was in part the "Day Timer" that is responsible for this (breaking things down into schedules, lists and having goals, it stops you from feeling overwhelmed), some of it came from trial and error or experience, and a lot of it is my zen teaching.

"What is a good man, but a bad man's teacher.

What is a bad man, but a good man's job..."

The crews that work under me see a level headed, cool-under-pressure woman that knows we can accomplish amazing things if we put our minds to it.

Most people don't know that I get angry. I do.

I mean eyes gone cold, jaws stiff, muscles clenched, with gnashing teeth - apopletic! It's a signal to me that something is wrong and I'll likely have to fix it, but it is usually only a brief flash.

Nine times out of ten when I'm this pissed off, I'm just as likely to burst out laughing. This is predictable because often what is making me angry is stupidity. Thoughtless remarks, idiotic actions, these are the things that drive me batty! Especially if they are getting in the way of my goals and taking time out of what is a very busy life.

Psychoanalysts would say that aggression is just a survival instinct, but I'm rarely aggressive when angry, unless someone is a direct threat such as breaking into my house (it's happened). Then I can feel that survival aggression kick in.

Don't fuck with my nest!

In both cases, anger over stupidity or a threat to my being, it is far better to examine the situation and act rationally. In the long run it is BETTER for my survival if I think before I act. No matter how pissed off I am, a 5' 4.5" tall, 128lb. woman probably isn't going to be able to do much to a 180 lb. burglar, who in one instance was actually a very large woman. And no amount of anger is going to banish the dunderheads of the world.

Break down almost any situation that makes you mad and you can patently see that uncontrolled anger makes little sense.

It is in fact unhelpful.

The other day I was making a left turn from the right lane of two lanes of left turning traffic. The ning nong on my left decided to go straight almost clipping my car. Sure, I could have let loose with a bird in his direction, but why should I be mad at a guy that is clearly a moron and whose behavior will probably get him killed, whereas I was able to avoid being hit because I have PATIENCE and experience driving in a city full of cars and moronic drivers.

In the Mechanistic view... Hobbes, for one, claimed that underlying reasons for behavior are the avoidance of pain and the quest for pleasure. In its rawest form this is the idea that all behaviors are instinctual; like fear, curiosity, aggression and reproduction. These are driven by instincts that we are born with, but that may be modified by learning.

Freud believed these instincts could be boiled down to two, survival (the sex drive) and fear of death (causing aggression).

If we spent all our time worrying about how much sex we were getting and when or how we were going to die, we’d be pretty miserable creatures.

These theories on behavior were later explained by biological drives and motivations. After all, if we all just went on instinct there would be nothing, but fucking and fighting with short breaks for feeding and no one would get anything done!

Controlled anger can be good...

Anger can be an effective tool that is often feigned to gain power over another. As a woman and a boss I sometimes have to put on the tough act to get a crew to move their asses when we hit an afternoon slump.

Anger can be used to great effect when it is aimed intelligently at a problem. Great causes like the fight for civil or gay rights began in anger.

But...

Using anger to constantly bully or mess with people in the end will get you nothing, people get tired of it. And the anger that comes out of guilt or shame, the blame anger? To waste your time being angry at others because of your own faults is extreme denial and an endless loop.

Being angry at the world or your situation – we've all been in these funks – gets you nothing, but an angry life. I've been there and I won't ever do it again. Trying to find a new way in life, while caring for an active 92 year old with dementia, with a partner, who is deep into his own goals, is no picnic, but being angry about it doesn't get me anywhere.

Finding solutions to fix it and make it better will.

And If I have to occasionally run into the kitchen to mouth off at the sink thereby gaining composure and the ability to act rationally so be it. So when the senior ladies at the YMCA let me know that on top of the extra two hours of class every week they are having a get together luncheon once a month?

I can patiently smile at the loss of yet another hour of my life, until I can find something to pummel with my fists!

Ohm...

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By M. Hannington

About a month ago I awoke in an awkward position, elbows bent and hands pressed together underneath me. My right hand was numb and there was pain. Nothing has changed.

As I sit here with my elbow pad on and my half numbed hand (an ulnar nerve condition) vaguely throbbing, I wonder if this is when it all starts? The body begins to break down, serious health issues creep in and my doctor no longer slaps me on the ass and says everything looks good. All those medical exams you're supposed to have every year are no longer "routine" but necessary to monitor "conditions".

What if something happens? Who will take care of me?

I pass Slouchy on the stairs and mention I may need surgery. He says "Yeah?" and goes into his cluttered office.

He is deep in rewrites and the only thing that perturbs him these days is the amount of dishes Ms. 91 and I seem to dirty in one day. Or why a glass and a plate remain on the sideboard and couldn't have been carted into the kitchen on one of my many trips and instead have become a part of his daily burden.

Then I look at Ms. 91, who turned 92 to much flourish yesterday and she's kicking ass. Her Graves disease is under control, her thyroid function now perfect and her blood pressure is down. The Doctor asks her if she feels frisky. She shrugs. He and I both laugh and he says, "Bernice, can I call you Bernice?" (the age difference, like mine and hers – two whole generations) "Since I started seeing you I haven't seen you acting more frisky, should we set you up on a date with a young 16 year old?" he says. "Eh!" she says and waves him off.

She stays Ms. 91 by the way until she hits the century mark!

For some reason I'm always the caregiver. Since I was eight years old I baby sat my brother, when I was eighteen my parents left me to care for myself and as I grew older I accumulated damaged people much as I did my animal strays. This started with an abused dog and then more stray dogs, now it's feral cats that I feed, find homes for their kittens and ensure that they'll never have kittens again.

With human strays I started early, at seventeen there was Laurie, who's father was hitting her and my parents graciously let her in before they moved away to a retired life. On my own, with no serious relationships and room to spare in my ancient drafty house, there was Crazy Mary, too good for the world, who made her living stripping, but never had a boyfriend. I constantly worried that in her goodness she'd be taken advantage of and nurtured her creative streak until she flew on her own.

Michael, a massive man, red-headed Michael, a hot-tempered Irish alcoholic, who would scare me by coming into my room and pressing me into the bed, but he'd be so drunk I could easily roll him off and onto the floor. Once sober, he found his way in the world, but those times when he fell off and busted some poor soul's face in a drunken brawl? He'd show up on my porch like the cats, needing a hug and someone to forgive him.

Peter, my photography professor from eons ago, who knows I am both perfectionist and slob, suggests my pain is from stress. He sent me this Dr. John Sarno article (you'll have to register to read).

Dr. Sarno says an injury in itself does not cause pain, but the stresses and pressures of life does:

"You might say, "What is wrong with trying to be perfect and trying to be nice and good?" Nothing is wrong in terms of our conscious lives. However, in doing this work I had to become very knowledgeable about the unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud's work is critical in this regard because he introduced us to the idea of the unconscious. I realized that these self-imposed pressures were causing some difficulty inside our minds. There's a leftover child in all of us that doesn't want to be put under pressure, and indeed it can get very, very angry. It began to look as though the primary factor psychologically here was a great deal of internal anger to the point of rage.

Self-imposed pressure is one of the sources. It's difficult to understand because one has to think in terms of what's going on in the unconscious mind. There are other kinds of pressures that are equally important, the ones that life puts upon us. Pressures from our jobs, our personal lives, our marriages, our children, and so on. It turns out that these pressures were equally disturbing to this leftover child inside of us.

Then a third category, which is also extremely important, are the angers that might be left over from childhood. These can extend all the way from outright abuse to what I call subtle abuse. Say, parents that expected too much of a child, or parents who didn't provide enough emotional support."

Indeed, today at the YMCA when the two-year old day care children passed by in their trolley, one of them waved and smiled and when a second reached out her arms to give me a hug, I had a pain-free moment. Perhaps her inner child had called out to mine. Come, come you need a hug and maybe it's time to play.

As I left the YMCA I glanced backwards. The rear of the Yarts sign – an art and theatre program headed up by a long lost Brit friend, Gillian – was just visible, the word backwards reads stray.

Perhaps for a while I can be a stray?

What do you say boys? I'll fly out to New York for a Yankees game and you can pour me a beer and crack me some peanuts. It'd be good for my inner child and my ulnar nerve to see you and some baseball too.

Posted by M. Hannington at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

I've been trying to judge Ms. 91's mental age. Given her dementia, it ain't exactly 91 and of course some days are better than others.

She is excellent at faking past this and sometimes I'm a conspirator.

Imagine a 12-year old trying to act adult, "Hello Mr. and Mrs. Jones, so pleased to meet you!" That's about the gist of it. She enters into her Y class and greets everyone by name (if she has forgotten a name, chances are she has asked me for it ahead of time) Today she bandied about pleasantries and asked about colds and illnesses that they had discussed on Wednesday during that day's class.

Beyond a week it starts to get dim.

Her short term memory is shot, which means she complains about having pizza and a frozen dinner and forgets the fabulous lamb roast I fixed last week. This compels me to try and cook fabulous meals every night, but it is not always possible.

When we are home and alone, it's a wholly different conversation from the public ones.

Ms. 91 usually naps after class, but today while I'm trying to write a Friday column... She sat down next to me and asked for a cup of coffee. Despite the fact that a Ms. 91 coffee is 4 oz. of coffee with 4 oz. of water, it still seems to do the trick. Pretty soon she is chatting away.

So I started Saturday's cleaning spree early. She loves it when I clean house!

It's far better than my always working on that "damn computer". She doesn't understand that computer skills are marketable and I can actually make money on my MacBookPro that is capable of producing 35mm film resolution special effects and much, much, more.

She'd rather I dust.

So dust I do.

She smiles while she watches me and offers helpful hints like, "Your going to need a ladder to dust that vase!" It's a two foot high vase on a six foot high shelf. Yao Ming could maybe handle it, but not me.

Here's our conversation:

Did all this stuff come with the house?

No, more than half of it is mine. I paid an extra five thousand for the belongings.

Oh, that's not much

No, it's not.

Did that Victrola come with the house?

Yes Mom.

How much is it worth?

About a thousand.

Are there records for it?

Yes Mom (open Victrola cabinet doors and show cases of records).

Are they old? What kind of records?

Of course they are old, mostly classical and lots of opera, Maria Callus, Enrico Caruso, that sort of thing.

Can you sell them? 'Cause if you got rid of the Victrola that chair could go in the corner.

(I happen to like the chair where it is mind you.)

How about the books?

Yes, some of those came with the house, too.

Do you have any first editions? Carol says those are worth something!

Yes, they are in a box in the attic.

Where would you go to sell them?

There is a book dealer downtown.

What's that? Is it a book?

No, it's a portfolio, it has photographs in it.

What kind of photographs?

He's a landscape photographer.

Are they worth anything?

Yes, I suppose.

What are those?

They're prints.

Did those come with the house?

No, I bought them. I'm going to hang them in the other room today.

What about those two paintings?

Those came with the house, old Spanish oils, perhaps a thousand a piece. (Now I'm getting the hang of it.)

Who painted them?

A student of Murillo's.

I love my "Lady with the Square Head" (a 60's plaster statue that Ms. 91 and my dad had carted around for years that I put on my shelf for her to look at), but she doesn't really fit in this house.

I have modern furniture in the other room. It's not all antiques around here Mom and when I dye the other couch I'll bring it in here, it's modern.

What's it made of?

It's leather.

What about that glass coffee table? Is it worth anything?

I don't know, probably not much. (I secretly hate this coffee table too, an unwanted inheritance, but setting it up mere steps away from the front door, rather than lugging a 3' x 6' piece of 1" thick glass and two heavy wooden gilt covered crossbars up two flights to the attic, appealed to me at the time.)

Mom? Do you want me to sell my antiques and put modern furniture in the house?

No, I was just wondering. I think I'll take a nap.

I quietly put Amelita Galli Curci's rendition of Juliet's Waltz from the opera Romeo and Juliet on the Victrola and went back to work.

YouTube Link

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By M. Hannington

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By M. Hannington

Caller: My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart
Dispatcher: Is this her first child?
Caller: No, you idiot! This is her husband!
A 911 tape

Octo Octo Mom
You have got to be an Octo Mom…
To the Tune of Macho Man by the Village People

Ms. 91 thinks that Octo Mom and her doctor planned on having eight babies in order to make money.

I can't seem to shake her of the notion.

I explained that this is exceedingly rare and has only happened once before in this country and only seven times in history and never have all eight survived. It is normal to implant more than one egg when doing in vitro fertilization. Really mom, no one could have foreseen this one coming.

"Well, she's nuts!"

Certainly mom, the woman has issues.

What I didn't tell her was that there have been cases of nine, ten, eleven, twelve and even quindecaplets. Fifteen! Most of these babies did not survive and this IS something we should think about.

Angelina is mad at Brad for wanting to bring his Mom in to help care for their peck of kids. This affects me how exactly? Not in the least.

That a woman had eight babies by in vitro fertilization is news. What she shops for, where she lives, whether she has had plastic surgery...

This isn't news, it's gossip.

Gossip used to be a positive thing. It was done among woman and helped provide a sense of community and a sharing of ideas on childcare and laundry and of course, for those looking, who were the best available men.

Incessantly discussing Octo Mom and Brangelina is a waste of time. I don't know them. How they care for their children is not my business and furthermore I could care less!

Joyce and Corey live behind me they have two young boys and they both work. Clearly they have some arrangement for childcare, but I have no idea what it is. I DO know where they bought their wall sconces and who did their plasterwork. THAT is information I can use.

If I happen to see their son Haizen on his bike alone, I stop what I'm doing and watch over him. Chances are his parents aren't far behind and I can do something if Haizen were to come to harm, I can't help Brad and I can do nothing about Ms. Octo.

I happen to live in a community where quite often my neighbors are also good friends.

It's an oddity.

Mine is a historic neighborhood within a city and in general our interests are the same; history, politics, crime and RESTORATION.

In a poor city we are often seen as wealthy, but the truth is if I were to take back all the money I've invested in my 110 year old house, I could have easily bought a nice house in the suburbs. It's a labor of love and a love of the city and its history that all of us here share. We don't care if you're black, white, Mexican, Agnostic, eccentric, or gay, we love you because you are here.

Like I said an oddity.

We have flash mobs. If someone sees a break-in, volunteer's cell phones go off and at all hours of the day and night, the house is soon surrounded. The police show up and whoever is inside has no chance of escaping unseen and they are usually caught.

Sometimes it doesn't work.

Some poor contractor was surrounded the other day and the mob was less than friendly. He was legit and apologies were made. These days with empty houses everywhere, it is not uncommon for "contractors" to show up and clear a house of all it's historic gems. Mantles, chandeliers, copper gutters and pipes.

We have monthly cocktail parties at each others homes. The conversations are often political, but mostly they tend to run like this:

"Drano to strip paint?"

"Really? Does it work?"

"Yes! I did the kitchen door and it stripped it clean and it hardly loosened the glue on the paneling."

"Wow, how cool."

We all have ways of gathering information. I for one have decided that Ms. 91 is spending way too much time reading the scrolling news on CNN. She is hard of hearing and rather than disturb me by boosting the volume she plops down and reads the scroll.

The problem being that she gets into it way too much and pretty soon she's shouting.

"Madoff is going to jail!"

May he be hung by his testicles and...

"Octo Mom has a new house. How can she afford a new house?"

That she pays attention to local news and the markets and serious stories is a good thing, but we could use a lot less Octo Mom around here.

The other day Ms. 91 said something profound. She said "I think I'm right on this one. The auto companies are in trouble because we have reached a saturation point and we don't need any more cars." "Look at Judy's car." she said "It's ten years old and it runs just fine."

You know what? She's right. We don't NEED anymore cars!

What we need is to re-think our way of life, come up with some new ideas and to go back to the kind of gossip that is helpful.

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By M. Hannington



The only real miracle is to stand still – Henry Miller

We waste so much of our time trying to control others and our situations, trying to get what we want… Sometimes you have to stand still and just let the world bring what it will. Allow things to be as they are.



I did. Serendipity and symmetry is happening all around me. Just ask my Zen friend Guardian O’ the Galaxy. Oh my GOG!

As sports fans we identify with teams. Sometimes this is a generational fandom. My granddad rooted for the Tigers and loved the game of baseball. So do I. Chances are that those teams of old were made up of people that lived where you did and were like you. Detroit is a blue collar town full of lunch box sports fans and Wisconsin is a dairy state with Cheeseheads. The same applies to college sports much of the time.



Sometimes it’s a personal identification. I love the Oakland Raiders, because I can identify with the darkness and the anger of the fans. I’ve always loved horror films with their monsters and villains. Marc Barasch, a psychologist calls this the “Freak Syndrome”, when you feel alienated from society you identify with aliens and monsters. Parts of my rebellious years were spent wearing black and being angry. It's a good fit for me.



Had that come in the sixties I’d be letting my freak flag fly and I wouldn’t have spent so much on clothes!



In the Fifties, America lived in teams; the white middle class lived in suburbs, blue collar workers on the other side of the tracks, and blacks in ghettos, each with his own team. The horror of the atom bomb and its shadow, the sixties and the civil rights movement has changed much of that. New technology and a global economy are going to bring new change. More and more people will not work where they live, but go where the work is and that steady job, the house in the suburbs, 2.2 kids, a car and a dog, will soon be gone. More people will be like Barack Obama, neither white nor black.

So what does this mean for teams?

Smart owners of professional teams will realize that it is all about creating a brand. Attracting star players that fans identify with or assembling a cast that wins using one style or another to draw the crowds. Someday the youth on the Sporting News web pages will come not to root for their grandfather’s team, because they no longer live where he did, but to find one that they relate to. Someday it may be the team that has the best Cyborgs or Androids. Why pay a player 20 million a year when you can build something cheaper.



We can't fight this new world it's coming, if we choose the path of wisdom it can be a harmonious one.

In Zen Buddhism you learn to relax your grip. You see things as they are and not as you wish or demand them to be and can discover and appreciate what is. I’ve been able to do just that over the years with sports. I can root for the Carolina Panthers or the St. Louis Cardinals because my friends have taught me to appreciate those teams and their history. In playing Fantasy Football and Baseball I’ve learned about the individual players and have come to respect their prowess no matter what team they are on.

There will be powerful voices here on VG.com, voices that can change minds. I love it when a new thought brings on a gush of other notions and the visions come flooding in. (For as you know, I’m a visual kind of girl.) It is an inspiration to read them and much of these words sprung forth from reading Annie Gottlieb's 1987 book on the Sixties generation, "Do your believe in magic?" This is a place where many more of those visions will flow forth. Here, I’m forming a team with another writer, someone that is a part of my unearthing process and someone dear to my heart.

In reality, none of us belongs to a team we are all individuals. Shades of gray. We enter each other's lives and we deserve to be learned; not molded or forced into roles, but valued for who we are. No one understands that more than Matt, my partner in this quest into the unknown.


Together we hope to find a little harmony in all the chaos.

Posted by M. Hannington at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is National Film Board of Canada's darling Theodore Ushev's animated film short titled Drux Flux. The official synapses of which is below:

Partly figurative, partly abstract, Drux Flux is an animation film of fast-flowing images showing modern people crushed by industry. Inspired by One-Dimensional Man by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the filmmaker deconstructs industrial scenes and their terrifying geometry to show the inhumanity of progress.

The inhumanity of progress?

The stark beginning of this film with its decaying industrial environment set against the sounds of creaking metal and footsteps is effective and impactful. The quick cutting images quickly sweep us into an old factory of rusting gears and chains. In this mixed media piece, photographic images mix with animated images and starkly horizontal and vertical graphics, blending order with a chaos of human and industrial images. It takes us back in time to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution with men in tams swinging sledgehammers and the use of the worker as propaganda in a distinctly communist style.

The filmmaker is Bulgarian and this genre often shows up in art from eastern bloc countries, but why he is belaboring (an apt word) an industrial revolution that provided jobs to those immigrating away from communist exploitation to live the, in this case, Canadian dream? This is a digital artist after all who is using high tech equipment to express his dismay with all that industry. If he wishes to free the factory worker from their misery, he must consider those village girls that have migrated to the cities in China to make the chips that power his precious equipment.

Ironic?

My grandad immigrated from Scotland to work in the foundries of Detroit. My mother's family came from the Eastern Bloc and lived on a dirt poor farm where an acre of pickles netted the family of nine a hundred dollars at the pickle factory. She remembers the stained hands and the aching back of her childhood. She also remembers the pain of being sent away to Detroit to live with factory working relatives because her mother could no longer afford her care. My grandad wore his tam and sweated in a Ford Factory, where he was paid handsomely. He saved his money and used it later to spoil the grandkids.

Who was better off?

Marcuse, writing in the 60's, would argue that we are slaves to consumerism. Controlled by advertising, we work more hours than we have to in order to BUY happiness. This cycle of work/buy makes us one-dimensional and unable to think for ourselves. Give Mary an iPod that will shut her up. No, I don't think it will. Working for a living and progress allows me this box that I can write and create on, it allows freedom of expression to the world.

Yes, a lot went wrong during the industrial revolution both here and in communist states, but why bring it up now? It's as if to say look at the crumbling factories, we were right!

But progress hasn't crushed humanity. In America we have voted for a different path and said out with backward thinking. It may not be the revolution Marcuse was hoping for, but it hardly supports his theory that we are slaves without voices either. Thanks to progress and the ongoing digital revolution Ushev has his too. Everyone can listen and watch it on YouTube or not, it is your choice.

Posted by M. Hannington at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

You can get lost in the world that this song paints, be brought to tears and never understand fully what it means. That's pure Tom Waits.

The first time I heard Tom Waits it was 1989 and the song was "The Piano is Drinking". I remember thinking anyone that can write lyrics like that was my kind of guy. I wasn't much into the blues then, in fact I wasn't into the blues at all that would come later, but this was something different.

I later bought the CD "Small Change" released on vinyl by Electra in 1976. It is still my favorite, though Mule Variations released in 1999 by his label Anti is probably even better experimentally with it's use of noise as part of musical composition. Being less than a decade removed from a fine art degree I suspect that my main attraction, outside of having grooved on one of his songs, was the cover art. I was a nut for Diane Arbus and the shot was so like her voyeuristic style.

Listening to "Small Change" was like falling in love with someone new and different. It was exciting and heady, funny and sad in a Waitsian way that is like no other and it had surprises too. Surprises are what make a fresh relationship so alluring and I was smitten.

The first song I played was "Tom Traubert's Blues", which I remember I listened to twice, it was enough to hook me. The next? "Step Right Up", which was written in 1977, was the kind of jazz scat that I liked and was right out of that 50's Beat thing that I loved and I didn't really appreciate Tom Waits until I saw him do it live.

His lyrics on the downtrodden and desperate would be akin to somehow finding wit and insight in a Walker Evan's Dust Bowl photograph. His best blues song here, for to me despite the elements of Jazz, vaudeville and alternative he is first and foremost a blues singer, is perhaps "Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" The line at the end at the end of the song illustrates that uncanny facility with words.

And I'll see your Red Label, and I'll raise you one more,
And you can pour me a cab, Christ I just can't drink no more,
'Cause it don't douse the flames... that are started by dames,
It ain't like asbestos. It don't do nothing but rest us... assured,
And substantiate the rumors that you've heard"

It gets me every time.

I hear you Tom, it ain't asbestos.

He said, "Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane."

I understand what he means now, but back then it was a process and it was people like Tom Waits that taught me how to think outside of the box. That I could do anything I wanted, that I didn't need to follow rules. That in fact breaking them was essential to learning your own style of art, which at the time was to become experimental animation.

It was Tom Waits that led me to see "Down by Law" and to look at film in a way I never had before. Through Jim Jarmusch's minimalist eyes. It also introduced me to the chatty Roberto Benigni and started a love of foreign and independent films that has never left me.

I can go to Tom when I'm sad and ALWAYS find a kindred spirit. I can live in the places he creates with his lyrics and escape for a time. I can laugh with him and be kicked by him, because most of all he reminds me of the passion that is involved in creating real art. The pain, love, fear and joy that can only come from your heart and in your own voice.

Tom said on collaborating with wife Kathleen Brennan, "Kinda like borrowing the same ten bucks from somebody over and over again." Thanks Tom for lending me that same ten bucks over and over until I had thousands.

One of the funniest scenes I ever guffawed for in a film was the I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream sequence in "Down By Law" with Waits, Roberto Benigni and John Lurie. Where a childrens' rhyme so wonderfully breaks up the monotony of four prison walls. And if anybody needs a laugh there is always this scene from Jarmusch's "Night on Earth", scored by Waits with Benigni at his verbose best.

Johnny Walker might not put out the flames, but laughter almost certainly will. With Tom Waits you can always count on that too.

Tom Waits 2008 "Glitter and Doom" Concert

Have a listen...

Posted by M. Hannington at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by M. Hannington at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

1.) My 5th Novel, 'The Pencil and the Penis' has, strangely, only sold well in Alberta, Canada.

2.) 'Survivorman', Les Stroud, once asked me for the time in midtown Manhattan, but insisted that I provide the accurate time for some South Pacific Island and I had no idea how far ahead/behind EST it was. When I told him that I could only provide NYC time for him to convert, he darted across traffic and disappeared.

3.) Car trouble? I'm your guy!

4.) My inability to accept the fact that there is 'no such thing as a Religious Hot Dog' has sent me to hundreds of Meat Packing facilities all over the world, without satisfaction.

5.) My obnoxious demand in the Drag Bar that the dancer 'take it off!', ended poorly for all concerned.

6.) I usually watch 'Dancing with the Stars' and DVR, 'The Biggest Loser'.

7.) My roommate has had six kids in the ten years we've been living together, and she thinks I don't notice how fast the TP runs out or how we never have any Peanut Butter left.

8.) Can never decide 'Regis' or 'Howie'? When queried regarding contemporary Game Show Greats.

9.) Although I am now 45, my stamina hasn't altered since my late teens.

10.) Women stop me on the street to compliment me on my luxuriant mane.

11.) North Korean Dictator, Kim Jong Il, borrowed my 'Roswell: Season One' DVD and it came back late AND sticky. Only my concerns about dragging the rest of the World into Nuclear horror have stilled my tongue.

12.) Coincidence? On two SEPARATE occasions, when Britney was photographed without Panties, I was also commando.

13.) I never even noticed her breasts.

14.) Paco, of Disco 92 Fame, is my Uncle.

15.) Jeanette Vigoreaux and I made out in Mrs. Altschuler's 3rd Grade class, but the scar on my tongue turned her off.

16.) Six toes on my left foot. Extra Testicle. 34B Breast implants in my freezer.

17.) I went on a killing spree in Chicago for awhile, dressed as a confused kid and targeted fat, sadistic, corrupt men in Clown outfits, who I then buried in my crawlspace.

18.) The Vatican condemned my memoirs, costing me millions in Advance fees.

19.) I, like Millions of other Americans, can see NO potential succesor for Tom Daschle at Health and Human Services, and am resigned to see the position remain unfilled.

20.) I cracked three ribs sucking in my gut and now don't enjoy eating Fries.

21.) Meredith Vieira is now angling for MY job.

22.) It's cold outside, so it will be Red Wine, Prezel Nuggets and 'Lifetime' TV all weekend long.

23.) I can never figure out why women can't resist me, but I've boiled it down to the understated elegance, verbal reticence and magnificent apartment.

24.) The Vatican condemned my 'Choreography for Jumpers' DVD, which was designed to allow people on the edge to leap gracefully and make an artistic statement with their last step.

25.) My 2nd Business was a Tranny Whorehouse on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, called 'Shiksas with Dicksas'. Twas a roaring success.

Posted by Matthew at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

One apologizing for something that wasn't there and the other worried over nothing. It's like arguing about air.

How in the hell does this happen to me?

How is it that I can have two male friends, who both being concerned with trivial things like their age and their asses, somehow merge in a comedy of errors?

Ah hah! Stepped out of my circle did I?

Chaos.

Working on VG.com these past months has become so second nature, so rhythmic; that I can reach a state of Zen here much faster than when I meditate.

It's not just process...

You shoot images, shape them, create them, animate them...

It's knowing intrinsically which are right, which "say it" and then making it happen in lightening speed in the available hours in the day.

Sometimes it's as if the images find me.

It's not always perfect...

Cranking up the VG.com machine can be frustrating. Glitches appear, bugs crop up and things that work perfectly in one place, mysteriously don't in another.

Working with code can become a day long chess match, where just when you think you've won, it turns out to be the wrong move altogether. Check mate and try again.

My work is done in the early morning when it's quiet here, during lunch and in the evenings just before the insanity of putting together the perfect meal for Ms. 91 (on a diet) and I (a vegetarian) and the dog (raw meat).

When this work spills out into my life it sometimes gets complicated. I'll decide to dash off some emails and get pounding on the keys, then Ms. 91 gets out the vacuum and almost strangles the dog, Slouchy calls to ask what he was supposed to get at the store...

He is a writer deep in the rewriting process and doesn't have the room in his head for such things.

Including the idea of WRITING it down!

Weeks have gone by when I'm busy with clients and my daily conversations with Guru slow to quick darts and then to nothing at all. Ah and working with a so-called, self-proclaimed even, self-righteous know-it-all can be a challenge in itself! Even typing self-righteous know-it-all is tough, but once you get used to not using the spacebar all that much, even that can be fun.

There are going to be times that I'm going with Sex Pistols and the other drummers are beating out Gershwin tunes.

How about you? GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!

The truth IS what it is...

Sid and George and Ira just make for noise and I LOVE the quiet drumming.

When the writing, the images become like drumbeats merging, soon joined by other drumbeats and together start reaching out. Further and further...

Those drumbeats, whether silent or shared, have a power much bigger than the drummers.

Posted by M. Hannington at 01:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I went to a funeral today. Mary, same name as me. I sat next to David, who misses his Dad and Judy, who'll never go into a box from the bag, but be put in an urn with her AC/DC flag.

It was sad.

It's how I feel.

I miss days with friends by my side and the dog that could make me laugh out loud. Dad made me grin with his intellectual pride. The catholic priest tells us, "Don't worry, they're up on a cloud."

They still bring me joy.

That's how I feel.

Those satyrs, who woo me, make me run 'til they fill me. Things that entice me and spice me, it's not ALL just some fad. When youth doesn't listen it just makes me mad.

I don't like to be mad.

It's just how I feel.

They'll all go into the earth's welcome mat. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... To be eaten by worms, who become a lone Robin's lust and the bird soon becomes a meal for a cat.

And the old cat dies and crumbles like rust.

And it covers the trees and it follows the breeze and sooner or later it's all part of us.

Part of everything...

It's how I feel.

Posted by M. Hannington at 07:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Lion's

It's nice of everyone to continual send me condolences for the Lion's "perfect season". Please STOP! I (seriously) have not watched a Lion's game in over four years. Ford's wildly stupid idea of bringing in a former linebacker turned broadcaster with zero experience to manage what was an already faltering team brought my years of Lion's fandom to an abrupt halt. Millen's mistaken draft choices floundered, the team became more and more pathetic and simply was no longer worth my time. Watching the Lions is like watching "Sophie's Choice" over and over, it's depressing. Until the delusional (or moronic) Ford Sr. gives up the reins I'm done.

They are dead to me.

One of the condolencers, our friend Mo, recently sent me this link Seven Most Bitter Crowd Signs From the Lions Historic 16th Straight Loss... In the article author Hopper closes by saying Detroiters should celebrate "...run into the street, overturn some cars, and set some shit on fire."

Why is it that sportswriters are forever equating Detroiters with the events of 1984?

I was there when Detroit won the World Series, I LIVE in Detroit and I didn't light anything on fire or turn anything over. The culprits were drunken kids from the suburbs, who have been known to trash the city in the past. For years, kids from my generation ventured downtown, drank, smashed their bottles against buildings, broke windows, partied in the abandoned spaces and trashed those too. It was never something I understood. I loved coming downtown.

Detroit

There is an identity crisis here that's simply inane today and I believe it has to do with the guilt, fear, or hatred (pick one) that goes hand in hand with the white flight that took place after the riots FORTY years ago.

It was the parents of these rioting 1984 kids that taught them to hate the city and thereby feel privileged to set it alight. I heard it growing up, not from my parents who worked and played in the city, but from those kid's parents, who had a medical practice up the street or worked for one of the many suburban corporate offices that had sprung up everywhere in the 70's and 80's. These were parents that had never EVER been downtown, but who had probably fled the city with their own mothers and fathers.

To them the city was a place of murderers, thugs, drugs and what remained unspoken, black people. To me it was the Grande Ballroom in 1967 where Iggy Pop was singing "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and the MC5 was to "Kick Out the Jams (Motherfuckers)" where I would later hang out with diverse crowds of the young at St. Andrews to see punk bands like the Ramones and A Flock of Seagulls, or local ones like See Dick Run, Beer on the Penguin, The Mutants or Destroy All Monsters. Where I could hang with the zoot suit, mostly black crowd at 5:00pm or the mostly white Jazz enthusiasts come showtime at either Bo Mac's or Baker's.

Beer on the Penguin

It is where my Tigers play ball and where my Redwings play smash mouth hockey, where I can yell "Opa!" at a plate of flaming cheese, or have the perfect martini. It is a place where the younger city workers black and white meet to have dinner or drinks or to dance, but the older white ones still flee to their suburban homes.

We're not perfect, but most of us don't set "shit on fire".

When the film "Virgin" came to Detroit we had our first pre-pro meeting and a chance to get to know one another. One of the Los Angeles producers had been warned by a friend "who had lived there" about the Detroit tradition of burning buildings on Devil's Night. Two people stood up and shouted "Oh Shit!" one white and one black; we both live/lived in the city and I suspect the producer's friend had not, but instead had a cozy home in West Bloomfield. I can picture her pelting a hated neighbor's home with eggs on Devil's Night and only dreaming of having an abandoned building to torch in youthful anger. The truth is your chances of putting that bar of soap to a window in Detroit is next to nil. Tossing an egg?

Forget about it!

Devil's night in the city has for the last dozen years been dubbed Angel's night. It's a night that Detroiters turn on their porch lights; lock the doors and STAY home. It's impossible to go anywhere with 50,000 volunteers driving 10 miles an hour, orange flashing lights atop their cars, clogging the neighborhood streets and making it nearly impossible to move about.

Detroit is Motown's home, and Coppola, Eminem, Selleck, Gaye, Gordy, Malcolm X, Parks (who I met when she came to shop at our annual neighborhood garage sale) and where tons of others had their homes. We've hosted an All Star game and a Super Bowl in the recent past and the fans reported? What? They had FUN here. The only fires I saw were the ones burning in the center of tables set out so families could roast marshmallows at the Motown Winter Blast.

Get over it!

Vegging out?

Being a vegetarian can be a lonely, frustrating experience. I pop for a movie for Ms. 91 and Slouchy, 28 bucks. I also send Slouchy off with 40 bucks for a rib dinner. That's almost 70 dollars to sit crying my ass off for half the duration of a movie and once home face starvation. There is 3 pounds of ribs and three sides for two. Slouchy and 91 have split the green beans, which leaves me with a half a cup of garlic-mashed redskins and a half a cup of baked beans (which I can't eat because they have pork in them).

The movie was "Marley and Me". Ms. 91 had read my copy of the book and wanted to see it. Don't bother. John Grogan is a talented slice of life writer, who knows how to take the events of everyday life and make them wrenchingly sad or comically hysterical. The movie was neither.

In the book the dog was so afraid of thunderstorms that it ate through a wall, a wooden crate and managed to escape a metal crate even under sedation. Creating a situation that required one of the two working owners to be home whenever there was a storm. This dog was so bad and the owners so at their wits ends that they began to consider finding a full time owner. That is until Mrs. Grogan miscarries their first child and she becomes utterly distraught. Marley refuses to leave her side through miscarriages, difficult pregnancies and then post-partem depression. It's what Marley does that's good that breaks your heart.

It's these heartbreaking moments that give the book soul and which apparently, some studio executive in his glee to make money on a holiday film decided to gloss over. That makes for a diluted picture that took absolutely no advantage of the original writer's skills. The exception is a short narrative montage that was so obvious a device to skip to the next chapter it too failed. John Grogan made me laugh out loud. The film? Not so much. The casting of Owen Wilson was what made me want to see the film and he is the only bright spot in the entire piece. Jennifer Anniston was what Jennifer Aniston is, cute and bubbly and by the end of the film I wanted to strangle her. She managed with the help of the adaptors to make the one really heartbreaking scene seem sappy.

It was the recent loss of my own little troublemaker that made watching this torture, where the book honestly deserved my tears, the film did not.

If you want to see a good film, the biopic "Milk" is the one to see. If Sean Penn's portrayal of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician, doesn't win an Oscar, I'll start watching the Lions again.

Posted by M. Hannington at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

I looked for him far and wide, my healer of hearts. I looked in Michigan in Ann Arbor, in the charming village of Franklin with its ancient cider mill and among the lovely old homes in Birmingham. I went to Nashville and Knoxville, and there in a lush backyard by the pool I almost fell in love. I may have needed him, but he didn’t need me, not really.



Bo, an Ann Arbor boy of course, all blond, muscular élan was too easy, only needing a calmer force in his life. Then Gabe, with southern Tennessee charm, his arms went around my waist so easily just as they would anyone’s who caught his fancy. No, it was a redhead who had me in full swoon. His photograph was what called to me, far stronger than the others, whom I had touched and known.

Hardly thinking, I boarded a plane to Memphis. It was May and the plane was full of the hip cool cats and zoot suit oldies that haunt the old clubs of Motown. The Beale Street Blues Festival was in full swing in Memphis. In my city, Detroit, neighborhoods like Black Bottom and Paradise Alley, that once heard the scat of Ella Fitzgerald and the jive of Duke Ellington are now silenced by the De Stijl architecture of a huge Mies van der Rohe complex and the carnival atmosphere of the Co-Pa (Tiger Stadium), but it's not so in Memphis, not on Beale Street.



Perhaps it was inevitable, that I would fall so hard. Not just for a redhead, who had knocked me over with a look and a light touch of my hand, but with a city so like my own. Full of old memories, the places where great musicians not only performed, but also gathered to swap tales and down whiskey. It had all started, the whole cycle, when I first moved to my city and met Bert. I had long loved the Motor City and I came to love one of it’s residents, Dr. Egbert Gotzian Driscoll III, he was my best friend.


He was a brilliant biologist that had had species named after him. He wrote papers with titles like “Another nomenclatorial review of the Carboniferous lamellibranchs Macrodon, Grammatodon, Parallelodon and Beushausenia” and he had sailed the world. He once sailed from the coast of England to Detroit, two weeks after having heart surgery (performed by the Queen’s physician no less). He had crossed the Atlantic with just his young girlfriend, like me decades his junior, who panicking one night had caused a Dutch freighter to reverse engines and come full stop.

We discussed not only species Driscolli, but Castaneda and petty tyrants, the dynamics between men and women, politics, art and the current loves in our lives, his were many and varied. We used to laugh about his ex-wife, who once was the head of Michigan N.O.W., how perhaps she would think him a “womanizer”, but I knew better. Bert loved us all. To him the best species was always the human one.

Back from a new odyssey, Bert stayed with me just before he died. We were like old girlfriends he and I. I had spent Friday nights at his house since I can’t remember when, just so we could have a Saturday morning talk over poached eggs and coffee, about who was fucking whom and the neighborhood gossip. Now it was his turn to stay with me; he was not well. I came home one day and he had gone over to the neighbors to pick apples and cherries and had made all these beautiful pies. It’s one of those memories that will always stick in my mind. His heart was giving out and he was making me pies.



When he died, he was back at home again and at the kitchen table we had sat at so many times. I hadn’t come that Friday night. I think we both knew it would happen that way. His first Friday home, regaling friends on his latest adventure in the ancient Aztec city of Oaxaca, Egbert III had come home again, this time to die.



So I flew back again, to Beale Street, for a red haired dog that I named Memphis, who would heal my heart after the loss of the second Egbert in my life had left it shattered. One dog named after a man that I missed and another for a city so like my own, where I once had a friend who meant the whole world to me.




After Bert died, I named my first puppy (a gift), Egbert IV after my friend. That dog became affectionately known as "Iggy". When he died I found, after searching through and loving so many other homeless dogs, a red-haired boy in the south. Memphis, is a rescued golden and he IS my "healer of hearts". He has had my heart for almost as long as them all. Today, my heart is again shattered, my healer of hearts is dying.

Posted by M. Hannington at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)