Oh, Diane!

i've always viewed the work of artists who have taken their own lives through a gauzy filter of loss. instead of living on it's own terms their music, pictures, words share a space loaded with desperation and demons and battles their creator's couldn't win in this lifetime. for me, kurt cobain's music is shrouded in his depression. van gogh's paintings (which i love painfully) bear the weight of his madness. it's hard for me to separate the artist's life's work from their life's end.

i went to see the diane arbus exhibit at la county art museum. you may know her as an amazing photographer of what could be described as the 'freaks and geeks' of culture- the disenfranchised, the ugly, the insane. she also killed herself in 1971. i expected to find her torment in the photographs, her conflict in the written words of her journals. i went prepared to be sad and to feel bad and to go through it. but that didn't happen. because somewhere between the pictures of multiple santas posing on an enchanted lawn, a beautiful transvestitie showing off her new cleavage, and a middle age couple at a nudist colony, i forgot how this story ends. i saw life in the eyes of her subjects- life and pain and humanity and the whole crazy bundle of it all mixed together. arbus had the good sense to just let her subjects be, no posing, no judgements. you can't look away. her journal entries, too, bristled with life. she had a wicked sense of humour and a penchant for clipping pulpy stories out of disreputable newspapers. i had just finished reading a letter she wrote to her lover and mentor, and was laughing over a silly line she wrote, when i saw the simple plaque relating the day of her suicide.

and, with surprise, it dawned on me, 'that's right, she's dead.'

ass kicking music to woo by

i was thinking this morning about the fine art of mix tape making. about how cool it was to get one from that boy, the one full of promise, who you don't know so well but are dying to know better. how you listen to it full throttle, gleaning clues from the songs, looking for secret messages hidden in their verses. a really good mixed tape can jump start a relationship like nobody's business. and what about making them? egads, the sweaty palms, the nervousness, trying to find the perfect lead off song, throwing in some good rockers, maybe a little something sexy, don't show off too much, build in suprises. i've always been of the geeky tape making variety prone to decorate the covers, add inserts, create witty (or lame) titles.

the best mixed tape i ever received featured the lyrics of a dylan song typed over the cover and an insert about ninjas. it also had a sticker of a cute girly with long brown braids on the back.
here's the playlist-
matter vs. space- beulah
kick out the jams- mc5
luckiest guy on the lower east side- magnetic fields
roadrunner- modern lovers
witches rave- jeff buckley
mice in the walls- johnny seven
apeman- kinks
2 kool 2 be forgotten- lucinda williams
sun goes down and the world goes dancing- magnetic fields
harley davidson- mick harvey
he's a real gone guy- jack mcduff
satisfaction- otis readding
come together- ike & tina turner
didn't say nothing- patti smith
don't mess w/ cupid- ny dolls
glitter gulch- elvis costello
walt whitman's neice- billy bragg + wilco
ballad of el goodo- big star
row boat- johnny cash
search and destroy- the stooges

*now that's some damn fine listening. that'll set a girl's toes tapping and her heart afire for sure.

hi...my name is

as a kid, my mom rarely called me by my given name. she worked up these two delightful nicknames which rendered the original moot. my childhood nombres des plumes? mona bona butt cheese and jezebel bubble butt. don't ask. i have no idea. she just loved them. they were like catnip nicknames for the lady. she would often call out to me, in front of large crowds of other children, (children with names like amber or holly or heather) "hey mona bona butt cheese, over here!" she taught them to my babysitter, a large jamaican gal who liked to drag me along on shoplifting errands to thrifty, with her. she would nudge me down the aisles urging, "now pocket that lip smacker like a good jezebel bubble butt, baby." where do you think this desire to nickname comes from? i have a friend name carla. a simple, lovely, easy name. yet i insist on calling her 'carlita.' will is often 'prince will.' corey is 'babycakes.' is it some kind of brotherhood/otherhood bonding thing, where we need to brand people as our own? a way of defining them and bringing them closer to us?

or is it just me? maybe i inherited some misfiring nicknaming gene from my misfiring mom.

i gotta get my mouth on that

o.k. now that we got that laugh-o-rama of a first posting out of the way, let's move on. not too long ago, i found myself at the jumping off point of a relationship with a new boy. he used to call in the morning right after i stepped out of the shower and i wouldn't get dressed so i could let his voice roll over my nakedy body. he revealed that he had 'super powers' in the ways of giving oral lovin' and that he would love to prove it. now, it must be said that i'm no slouch- i am blessed with very little gag reflex, know how to keep my teeth out of the way, and genuinely dig getting a little (or a lot) of something in my mouth. but super powers? i don't know. it sounded to me like the gauntlet had been thrown.

so, i searched the net for some advanced techniques which would leave this boy sexxed up, spent, and satisfied. i wanted him to be chomping at the bit to unleash his full super poweriness all over my girly parts. many of you will know exactly what i found out there. plenty of 'hot facials' and cum pix, which, while being charming, are tough to cull specific advice from. i mean, the blonde girl with candy apple red nails seems to enjoy the dude gizzing in her face, but how does that help me? next up, i found a variety of weak, cosmo type advice such as "to get your man hot, take his penis out of his pants." wow! now that's mind blowing. or "use your tongue and mouth on his most sensitive parts." tongue and mouth, eh? that's so bizarre, it just might work. i even took a quiz on what type of oral sex tecnhique would work best for me and found out it would be a tongue piercing.

The Oral Sex Tip You Should Try Is: A Pierced Tongue

When it comes to oral, you've mastered almost every skill around

Besides digging through untranlated exotic sex manuals, you've got one option left

A pierced tongue is almost sure to drive anyone wild, but when combined with your skills...

Watch out! You'll be so good that if you're not careful, you might not have regular sex again




More Great Quizzes from Quiz Diva

is there no way i can be super hot and sexy without someone driving a spike through my tongue? losing hope, i found a magical site. specific, fully detailed, gorgeous techniques, with names like 'the butterfly' and 'the figure eight' and 'the swirly'. it was written by a gay man for other gay men to give terrific gay blow jobs and how cool is that? the best site ever. i took the advice, memorized it, tried it out on the boy, and can i just say? holy jesus christ god. he was a happy boy.

oh, and also, his super powers are totally legit.

brisket and pot ash or dying ugly

my grandmother was the stuff of legends, a mythical gaudy creature. a heartbreaker. according to family lore, she shuffled off the squaresville coil of her air force officer husband and six daughters to run away with a small time gangster named big al. they took it on the lam with a bun in the oven and several thousand dollars of the bank's money. apparently they were fairly inept, as gangsters go, and ran out of money in a small town called garden city. shortly after the birth of their baby, big al was found hung on a meat hook. so there she was, one baby, zero cash, and six kids abandoned in the beehive state. and there she stayed.

my mom finally took me, via amtrack, to meet her, when i was 14. i imagined a femme fatale, all red lipstick and super slim cigarettes. i imagined a cruel beauty. the woman who made my own mom crazy. what i found was an old broad with yellowed skin and big pores, who smoked lots of non filtereds and lived in a trailer. she fixed us bologna sandwiches and talked about brisket. all of her stories revolved around cooking and eating really delicious brisket. though we, ourselves, on this particular trip, never ate any. she smelled like soup and i didn't like her.

the doctors told her alcohol would kill her and it did. 10 years later we took another train to her funeral. she had been cremated and the plan was to bury her ashes at my mom's oldest sister's farm in iowa. grandma's ashes were collected in a glass 'sun tea' container which spent the afternoon on the kitchen table. annie, the only baby she kept, the daughter of big al, showed up in a tight tee shirt with fringes secured by sparkly beads. it read 'my body is an outlaw, it's wanted in 7 states.' she was the prodigal and the other girls clearly resented her. then there was jim, grandma's boyfriend. he was a man, missing an arm and with a penchant for long, lingering hugs. he was the sad hero of the affair, the boy who'd lost his girl. at the ceremony, we were all asked to pour little peices of grandma into the rose bushes while aunt mary played 'glory of love', by peter cetaris on a boombox. i started to cry. not regular crying, but those deep, earth shaking sobs usually reserved for the worst dreams. i didn't know this woman, i didn't like this woman, i held her responsible for all sorts of nastiness and yet here it was. she was a woman and a mother and a person who someone loved. she drank and smoked and ate brisket and died. and there you have it.

jim ended up giving everyone from the funeral party head lice and we spent the next few days washing and picking through our hair with an impossibly tiny metal comb. then he called everyone and asked them to join the 'friends and family' plan from m.c.i. but no-one felt much like doing it.