toy accordions,
antique typewriters,
New Orleans (never been),
Coney Island (only been once),
blood-letting,
trashy harlequin romance novels,
red lipstick,
rouge,
rogues,
Russian,
roulette.
eavesdropping
Blood on a banjo
and a sloooow southern draaaawl.
Cackling wildly into the night's sky,
and driving with my eyes closed.
I need to get more sleep.
Music
dirges and knee-slappers.
It's all movie music to me....
Movies
Television
is a sedative. Be careful not to O.D.
Books
"One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, "I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged"
"I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I've never spoken. It's always there, in the same silence, amazing. It's the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight."
"Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eightteen. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, I've never asked. But I believe I've heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they're going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larger, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest I might have taken in the reading of a book."
"Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if writing isn't, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it's nothing."
"Now I see that when I was very young, eighteen, fifteen, I already had a face that foretold the one I acquired through drink in middleage. Drink accomplished what God did not. It also served to kill me; to kill. I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me. I knew it in the same as other people, but, strangely in advance. Just as the space existed in me for desire. At the age of fifteen I had the face of pleasure, and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure. There was no mistaking that face. Even my mother must have seen it. My brothers did. That was how everything started for me- with that flagrant, exhausted face, those rings around the eyes, in advance of time and experience."
"...the inadequacy of childhood has turned into something else. Has ceased to be a harsh, inescapable imposition of nature. Has become, on the contrary, a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind. Suddenly it's deliberate. Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire."
"I had the luck to have a mother desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life's happiness, at it's most poignant, couldn't quite make her forget it."
"I could get it wrong, could think I'm beautiful like women who really are beautiful, like women who are looked at, just because people really do look at me a lot. I know it's not a question of beauty, though, but of something else, for example, yes, something else- mind, for example. What I want to seem I do seem, beautiful too if that's what people want me to be. Beautiful or pretty, pretty for the family for example, for the family no more than that. I can become anything anyone wants me to be. And believe it. Believe I'm charming, too. And when I believe it, and it becomes true for anyone seeing me who wants me to be according to his taste, I know that too. And so I can be deliberately charming even though I am haunted by the killing of my brother."
"This self-betrayl of women always struck me as a mistake, an error."
"You didn't have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn't exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it."
"I answered that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing. Jealous. She's jealous.No answer, just a quick glance immediately averted, a slight shrug, unforgettable. I'll be the first to leave. There are still a few years to wait before she loses me, loses this one of her children. For the sons there's nothing to fear. But this one, she knows, one day she'll go, she'll manage to escape."
"I never got over the horror they inspired in me then. They don't mean anything to me anymore."
"She's become just something you write without difficulty, cursive writing."
"And I'll always have regrets for everything I do, everything I've gained, everything I've lost, good and bad.."
"They'd never talk about the mother among themselves, about the knowledge of her which they both shared and which seperated them from her: the final, decisive knowledge that their mother was a child."
"I wonder how I had the strength to go against my mother's prohibition. So calmly, with such determination. How I managed to follow my ideas to their "logical conclusion.""
"He says you only came becacause I'm rich. I say that's how I desire him, with his money, that when I first saw him he was already in his car, in his money, so I can't say what I'd have done if he'd been different. He says "I wish I could take you away, go away with you." I say I couldn't leave my mother yet without dying of grief."
"I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I've always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I've always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it's so like me. Today I tell him it's a comfort, this sadness, a comfort to have fallen at last into a misfortune my mother has always predicted for me when she shrieks in the desert of her life."
"Kisses on the body bring tears. Almost like a consolation. At home I don't cry. But that day in that room, tears console both for the past and for the future. I tell him one day I'll leave my mother, one day even for my mother I will have no love left. I tell him that when I was a child my mother's unhappiness took the place of dreams."
"We're united in a fundamental shame at having to live. It's here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother's children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society. We're on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of what's been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves."
"My mother didn't forsee what was going to become of us as a result of witnessing her despair."
"We, her children, are heroic, desperate."
"I laughed fit to burst, fit to die."
"He lives in terror lest I meet another man."
"My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women."
"She's made in such a way, face and body, that anything that touches her shares immediately and infallibly in her beauty."
"She makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvelous dream of putting her to death with your own hands."
"I am worn out with desire."
"A pleasure unto death."
"I'm still part of the family, it's there I live, to the exclusion of everywhere else. It's in its aridity, its terrible harshness, its malignance, that I'm most deeply sure of myself, at the heart of my essential certainty, the certainty that later on I'll be a writer."
"An image of intolerable splendor."
"She has a golden laugh, fit to wake the dead, to wake anyone who listens to children's laughter."
"Alone, queenlike....."
"That's what it's all about: this hankering for death."
"I lost the taste for my own pleasure."
"It's in this valor, human, absurd, that I see true grace."
Heroes
Amy Sedaris,
Charles Bukowski,
And the Curious Taxidermy of Walter Potter.
About me: I wear my faults on my sleeve and keep my heart in a vault.
Nothing, that hasn't tried twice already, can kill me.
I've got a story....
Hell, I have several! Just been so busy with working on re-writing the whole damned thing.
" If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner."
-Tallulah Bankhead
(of course I only like that quote so much because I've made so many damn mistakes....)
I've got my Mother's manic-depression and my Father's tendancy to over-indulge.
ADD ALSO:Plagued with an absurdly serious problem with taking myself, or anyone else for that matter, seriously.
"Madonna of the Unloved"
"An introverted young woman, she has the absolute right to mess up her life."
-Guillaume Laurant from "Amélie"
Who I'd like to meet: Straight-from-the-hip-shooters with razor-sharp wit. The confident, but not too cocky. Art Fags. Nostalgic Nit-wits. Movie/music nerds. Those who have a predilection for dark humor. Someone who can be a hatchet to this hard-head. Loners and the socially inept. Last but not least, the firing squad- better sooner than later.... let's get this thing out of the way now, shall we?
TOMORROW NIGHT! With The Sounds of Kaleidoscope (PA), DJ Lord Thomas (Richmond) and DJ Amanda Otto. 2 for 1 drinks till 11pm and early burlesque show, so get there early!
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