May I post without a title?

Still Life with Boat

Radio Mornings

The radio is quite good. No adverts. Great diversity. Humour. Fun intellectual and word challenges. DJs easily use the word hegemony. Favorite quote: "It's like a joke, but not as funny." There is much poetry including a very moving poem written for Amy Winehouse and Ginsberg reciting "Howl."

Trip to Arran

I set my alarm this morning. The first time since Tudela. I actually have a cell phone now; I accepted the first offer after a neighbor fetched me at the library to tell me my Gran was waiting on an ambulance to go to the hospital. A concession to the norms and eases of the moment as another type of freedom--always though at whose cost. Perhaps it is better to put out the neighobor than the earth mined and workers underpaid to manufacture my phone. However, it makes everyone easier to have me having a phone; so, I caved in. There were only two other times I took a phone for calling purposes. The first was when I went to Roma for the day, and I was meeting up with Luciana later after she had spent the morning with her mother. And, the other in Perugia when we were meeting Ayana at the train station, and she wasn't there and Vivi and Pietro drove to the other possible stops, and I stayed with Pietro's phone at the main station for them to keep in touch. In Tudela and London I borrowed the alarm clock on hosts' phones. In Italy, my friends woke me and once I think I had an alarm clock. I can probably count on my hands the number of times in the past few months that I have had to wake up for a specific time. Today though was different. I wasn't sure what time I had to wake. I wasn't sure what time the ferry was. I just knew for a trip like this I would have to get up early; so I did. I took my time and bathed, sewed up the holes by the backpocket of my jeans while I ate breakfast, and then made myself a lunch--the only bag I packed, and I will tie it to my belt loop.

I took the number 11 bus almost from the first stop to almost the last. I sat at the top. All the way, I could see the hills of Arran slate blue jags of shapes on the horizon. The weather has been embarrasingly good here and only a few clouds clustered like cotton tufts above the highest peaks. Oh sleeping warrior. And the strips of blues rainbow on the water as morning haze burns away.

I got there about half an hour after the second ferry of the day, and so right now I am waiting for the third ferry at half twelve. I thought I would poke about Adrossan because I have not spent much time in the center, but after walking for a wee bit and not finding a spot that I wanted to go to, I decided to hop the bus back into Salcoats and swing by the Heritage Center to check my internet and then get a coffee and donought at the Kandy Bar.

Some Thoughts on Sky

Weekend in Glasgow

I am sitting here in my cousin's flat in Glasgow. I just had rhubarb pie with a dollop of double cream for breakfast, orange juice and coffee. It is another sunny day. I went running in Queens Park. I love the trails made by people using the park.

On Friday we went to the museum. I must have been hazier than I even realized then because I do not know the name of the museum. It was near Glasgow University on the west end. We just wandered about. It was large and beautiful. One wonders from where the wealth to build with such precision. I could not believe that I had never been to the museum before. It was a place we would have loved as kids but rarely were we taken into Glasgow. We went to castles in Ayrshire, Burns Cottage, the Electric Brae, Porten Cros, Largs, Milport, Arran, the Healy Brae.

Sunset, Crosshouse Hospital

Plaça Catalunya

Still Life with Death

Le vagine

One of the best things about traveling like you're home rather than traveling as a tourist is the future of a place becomes more visible. Tourists are often directed to the monuments of the past or the institutions of the present. Because I am visiting Viviana Lorenzo my best friend who lives here, I have access to the desires of what Italy is and is becoming as a home. My best time here was our visit to Firenze where my friend lived for six years while she attended university and wrote an outstanding thesis called URBAN CENTER Partecipare al pianificare. L'esempio inglese, le prospettive italiane. We traveled up with Luciana Lepore, her mum, and after getting a cafe, they went to the dentist, and I sat in a park and read my notes for my dissertation. We then walked and had a delicious lunch at Lo Skipper. The food was so good, it brought tears to my eyes. Lunch is 6€ and includes vino, agua, pane, e cafe. Siciallian, the south. Also its worth ordering the canoli for desert which comes with a sweet wine. The weekend continued like that walking through Firenze, the duomo almost always in sight. Stumbling upon the work of Banksy and then inside a church a fresco of a Madonna del latte; yes, she breast feeds her son. Hanging out with friends, going to the market, long conversations about I can no longer remember as we fix a hanging lamp using the wrong-sized allen key.

We return to Perugia on Saturday night in time for a quick dinner that Pietro Grandi, her husband, who wrote an outstanding thesis called Spazi aperti e sistema urbano LA PIANIFICAZIONE DI RETI ECOLOGICHE PER UN SISTEMA DI SPAZI PER LO SPORT, has prepared--proscuitto, mozerella, and bread--before we head out to the industrial outskirts of Perugia to see Le vagine a production by Fontemaggiore Teatro Stabile di Innovazione and l'associazione Centrodanza. One of Vivi's friends, Grazia Paciullo, a scholar of Islamic law, is in the cast.

The program is a single sheet of paper in black and white. The front lists the production information; the back is a brief description of the show, "Liberamente ispirato ai celebri monologhi di Eve Ensler, 'Le vagine' è uno spettacolo in cui dodici donne si raccontano attraverso alcune esperienze fondamentali della loro vita, secondo una modalità che potremmo definire post-enleriana..."

We arrive almost late. The theatre is full but we are able to get seats one in back of the other. The theatre is also small. I like that. A black box; if I remember correctly. And pink. The stage is dressed in pink drapes and in the folds are objects, some of them toys maybe all of them. I immediately feel at home in this black box of bright pink fabric waves. It made me think of a performance at the NY fringe festival in the late 1990s for which Cristina Ruales designed the costumes dressing both men and women up in bright vat-died pink outfits. I also think of Tisa Bryant's "Autodidact" (2006) and a young brown girl's delight in discovering the coveted pink.

I have two confessions to make before I continue. I have never seen nor read The Vagina Monologues nor do I speak Italian. I approached this performance with a Brechtian faith in theatre. I was content to miss plot and semantics of words. I would allow stage design, lighting, body movement, facial expressions, props, the musical score, the music of language, and the music of an audience in darkness, to transform me. The third confession, I write this a week later relying only on dear memory that trickster of friends who delights in masquerading a jumble of time and space as real and linear. Forgive me my transgressions.

The show was a gift. Each woman comes on the stage and introduces herself. She is dressed in pink. A bathrobe, pig tails, or lingerie. Her body is beautiful, and she knows how to use it to create a strong sense of character and story. There are too many to keep track of in a labeling or orderly way of tracking. She is shy, she is playful, she is lusty, she is closed, raunchy, sweet. Mostly she carries a chair, but sometimes she doesn't. And when she is done with her brief introductory monologue, she joins the line of women center stage. One by one she comes on to the stage and speaks to us until we have gathered there the entire ensemble. and then together they animate le vagine through dance. it was so amazing. the chairs are in a long line, and they with fast short steps, the sound of twenty-four bare feet, pattering, pattering, a long thin oval round a line of chairs. This is heaven. It is horizontal. It is pink. It is woman. It is dance and the music of feet against the would of a stage. You do not need to know the languages to appreciate a long list of the different names for le vagine recited like a woodwind solo each woman a different note on the scale.

What does it mean that the cast looked all white? Can I say that in Italy? When everyone knows that Italians are black. How can the cast look white? What does it mean to be Italian? Ayana Vellissia Jackson taught me a coping mechanism called counting. Just the black people. Seeing me walking down the street, I wouldn't be counted in our count. The count doesn't count because we are in Italy and everyone knows Italians are black. The Jamaican landlady on 7th Avenue in Park Slope in 1980 would rent to my friends because they weren't white; they were Italian. Who is Italian now? Which shades count? Which languages? We don't count the people at the train station because train stations are places of transcience a magnet for black people. Who lives in the center? Who goes out in the center? Who lives in the peripherary? Who goes out in the peripherary? How do those terms mean in cities whose walls are nearing a thousand years old but their doors are now arches and have been for hundreds of years?

The finale was spectacular. If first they open with a horizontal vagina, then yes please finish with a vertical vagina, a vagina tower rising meters up off the ground and made of chairs and the bodies of twelve women. Each woman, who we have heard moan, and dance, and talk, and pose, takes her turn to say her final words to the audience before she joins the tower and placing her head framed between the legs of a chair stacked with other chairs, two columns, and the spaces between and within.

To Do List (in code)

1. Fix up Collards
2. Fix up Radishes
3. Search CalliflowerYamJuices
4. Email CucumberatLettuce
5. Email SugarplumLychee
6. Check EggplantEndive
7. Email Watermelon,Apple,&Date

This is obviously a private list. So then why I am posting it on my blog? Well the last list I posted, I did so well completing, like it was easy and almost joyous, while often my handwritten pocket lists go slow and partially ignored. This is a list I have begun ignoring, so I though lets test out my theory about a public list. Even if it is mere proving through tautology, I can dig getting this list done. I didnt write the last list in code because I thought the information would prove useful for other readers as it was about how to prepare for a trip. This list is personal about stuff I need to get done. As a reader, because it is in code, does it make you a curious reader? Another strategy for camaflouge would be to write a really long post and embed the list somewhere in there. I wonder though if it would have the same effect. I am banking on the pressure of visibility as inspiration to act according to word.

In a Foreign Language

Now, I am what should be a stereotypical American in the sense that I am mutlicultural and multilingual. I am comfortable with difference and the encounter of the foreign. I feel myself connected to many identities, racial, ethnic, and national. As we encounter in American mainstream and underground arts, gender is fluid for me as is my sexuality. American is a word that encompasses two continents and the cultures formed through the dialogical dynamics of oppression and resistance. However, my Italian sucks. And the specifics of my personality, or my Britishness...perhaps my paricular Britishness which is Scotch Irish, I cringe at the thought of going to the supermarket on my own unable to speak the language. The cringe is isolating. I want to just stay in the apartment working on my dissertation in English. It is much more difficult traveling with a dissertation than I anticipated. It is such a vampire in that it pulls me away from connecting with the people around me and turns me into a creature of my own desires where I sleep when I want and eat when I want and lock myself in my coffin when I want with a great feeling of jouissance.

Bliss in Perugia

I am sitting with my back to a floorlength open window listening to the cd of Gnu Quartet, a performance we stumbled upon last night in the city center that does instrumental covers of pop songs. I am reading the book of theory that I took for granted even though I had no idea it existed. Chela Sandoval in Methodology of the Oppressed argues that the "survival skills, theories, methods, and the utopian visions" of U.S. third world feminists are "not just useful but imperactive to all citizen-subjects." I am learning how to taste coffee. A quick lunch was prosciutto and provelone on toast. I went for a walk to get gelatto with my best friend from when I was three. I am sitting in front of an architects library of anarchy, futurism, and socialism. This is the town I spent three weeks in at age 11 and have been dreaming of returning to for near enough two and a half decades. Tonight, we are going to check out the demonstration organized in conjunction with the demonstrations occuring this weekend across European cities to demand economic change.

Guest Blogger: Pedro Number One:

This situation is odd

Colour Your Own Blackface

at the Rowan Tree Garden Centre situated on the A78 tourist route.

First Hours in Scotland

You get off the plane at Prestwick Airport--Pure Dead Brilliance and purple thistle themed hallways. This is a small country. The air wraps you sweet and dancing. Make no mistake you are in faerie land. There is an airport; there is a train station; there is a golf course; there is the water. The train arrives and pulls you through Ayrshire towards Glasgow Central. You have your boarding pass from the plane and buy a single for £3.35.

T-2 Days

More like one day. I am at the paralyzed stage. Where a really lovely day did not allow for much checking off of the lists... maybe. I did do a lot. It was all threads hanging down and paperclips. I don't like saying goodbye. I need to sleep. I need to breathe. I played baseball for a minute this evening at the end of a little league game. I had a long lunch. I started a gallery. I made a picnic. I picked up a pay check. I canceled my phone (for after I left). I made phone calls. I still have to pack. I feel like a failure because I have not yet packed. I need to print out my ticket. I need to print out directions for when I get to London. I need to make sure I have all the phone numbers I need. I watched the dirt-dusted ball travel towards me; I love that I can see where it is going to be and connect, clowck, the sound of switching directions on impact. I do not have jeans. How can I travel without jeans? The sky at late sunset and shades of midnight blue to periwinkle. A moon sliver and the just budded green tree leaves caught in a caress of electric light.

T-3 Days

I am just off the phone with the insurance company and my bank, which always does so well by me. I have decided I am not going to stress. I am going to be responsible. I have my ticket there and back and what happens happens. I am going to buy myself a pair of running shoes that I cannot afford because I want to go running and my current shoes are a year old, and I do not want to return injured. I also need to buy a flash drive to store my photographs. That is the only battery-powered technology I am taking. And maybe my digital voice recorder.

I heard a quote from Betty White this morning when I was listening to WNYC AM820. She said how people love to complain and can get upset with her because she has nothing about which to complain. Betty White has always been one of my idols since I started watching reruns of the Golden Girls as a child. Now I know why.

I have paid my credit card bills. Finished a draft of chapter one of my dissertation. And am doing my best to tie up financial and personal threads before I leave.

The background color of this blog is black because that is the most environmentally responsible. The background color of my phone is set at black, which reminds me, I need to turn off my phone. I am really excited about traveling without a phone in my pocket. That used to be the way I rolled. I think it is important to remember the ability to travel and connect with people independent of the technology of a mobile phone. The internet and its technology is easily shared in public spaces. The technology of a mobile phone is much more private. For instance, I can check my email from a library; I can write a blogpost from a library; there is not a similar public access to the mobile phone. I am not going to be wirelessly networked for a few months...

T-4 Days

I am about to head off on vacation and have decided to blog it here. Really, I am planning to keep one foot off the grid, here at this site will be my concession to communication in a digital age. I write this as I listen to Morrissey's Years of Refusal on vinyl.

Before I leave I still need to:
A. Finish a draft of Chapter One of my dissertation
B. Send the police report to the insurance company
C. Pack
D. Set up a gallery space
E. Organize my room
F. Organize my office
G. Organize my itinerary
H. Pay credit card bills
I. Tie up a variety of financial and personal threads

That is enough of a list for now.