dance me through the panic

poetry is just the evidence of life.

 if your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

-l.c.

.in my head. in my head.

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

Helen Hayes, in Roy Newquist, Showcase, 1966

the best laid plans are often laid to waste...

i’ve never been a fan of new years resolutions, as mine tend to be dramatic and overzealous. but there’s something beautiful in envisioning what the year should look like. while fate and the forces that be tend to take my ideas and plans as a cosmic joke to rearrange and watch me squirm, there can be a happy medium. i want to make a list of things to remind myself of what i actually want to accomplish and see what shakes out....

im tired. tired of moving, tired of new, tired of change, tired of rolling with the punches and mising the point. i feel its all a bunch of lessons but i never have time to figure out what im supposed to be learning.

1. i want what i say i want every year - art. i want a release. i want to create. i want to find beauty within my self and express it outwardly.
-im going to do a day-by-day in feb. everyday, im going to create something new. perhaps a self portrait every day or a colour study or something themed (themes help me stay focused). im going to get my distractions in order in january and then free myself up for art in february.

2. im going to find financial security. january wil be spent getting my financial matters in order. by the end of january, i will have a budget completely organized and in place. i think matt and i should rearrange our current situation and google calendar should be able to help with a joint budget

3. i want to be practicing massage by march. i want everything in order for my license and i want to actually be practicing.

4. i want to explore my options with lush. perferably as a training liason or the like

5. i want to purchase a holga or a diana and i want to be taking pictures regularly

6. i want to be healthy. it’s going to include more fresh fruits and vegetables, more exercise,  less cigarettes, less coffee, less processed foods.

7. I want to discover my new surroundings and to connect to the community. volunteer at the ywca with battered women, local farmers market, etc

8. i want to garden. even if it’s only a little bit at first, i want to really try to grow stuff and take care of the earth. i want to convince grandma to compost.

9. i want to find intimacy with matt. i want to release what's holding me back, and i want to find open communication with him. it seems as though the longer we’re together, the less we talk or are willing to say. the only way to keep this relationship strong is respect, support, honesty, kindness, and consideration. i have no idea how to cultivate this. relationships are foreign to me. making them work is even harder.

10. i want to regain my spiritual center. going to church, reading merton, mother theresa, lewis, etc. writing, exploring, meditating

11. i want to find a way to have time to myself.

12. i want more time with loved ones. i want to cultivate relationships with those i love. i have such little quality time with those i hold most dear and this simply wont do. the girls, des, tyler, all the dads, gma, mom, ash, mel.

13. i want to write letters and send packages more often

14. ink!!! i want more ink!!!

here goes nothing...................................................!

luna.typepad (i forgot it's magic)

the smart ones often isolate themselves

" The subject of loneliness and the observation of the isolated person has always interested me. Even as a child, I couldn’t help but notice those who didn’t fit in for one reason or another—myself included. In life, and for my films, I have always been interested in the out-of-step. Curiously, it’s usually those who are either too smart or those who are too stupid who are left out. The difference is, the smart ones often isolate themselves, while the less intelligent ones are usually isolated by the others. In Nights of Cabiria, I explore the pride of one of those who has been excluded. "FEDERICO FELLINI

x

.shake me down. 

.not a lot of people left around. 

.thedesignerpad.

I found this on 'thedesignerpad' (my new obsession) and had to share! how delightful are these pictures?!

We've always known Parisian women to be icons of elegance and sophistication. But haven't you often wondered how this fabulousness influences the way they live? French photographer Baudouin uncovered this myth for us. Through his unique essay “Les Parisiennes,” he captured a variety of Parisian ladies, from unknown backgrounds, in their homes going about their lives. He gives us a more realistic and contemporary view of Paris and its people — in this case les femmes. “I have made it a point that all photographed women had been born, raised and educated within the city of Paris. Those are the ones who naturally carry the Parisian culture without the desire to become Parisians.” For me, these images are a real treat since I've always been a big admirer of the City of Lights. They have given me a much desired peek inside Parisian homes, and allowed me to see how their decor is an extension of their personalities and how varied their styles are. C'est magnifique!

Via Sutkutusu

i've spent most of my life focused on everyone i'm not. it's so far past time to figure out who i am.

i know that things that move me, that affect me, that cause me to take a moment and simply exist. i just need them to all connect to make a collective, cohesive whole.

lets see how this goes...

.xxx.

Federal crackdown on child prostitution results in 884 arrests

By Michael Martinez, CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Authorities say they recovered 69 children from prostitution
• Seattle has 16 kids recovered from prostitution, the most of 40 cities
• The crackdown is part of the ongoing Innocence Lost National Initiative

(CNN) -- A three-day federal crackdown on child prostitution rings across the country has resulted in the recovery of 69 children and the arrest of 884 people, including 99 pimps, federal authorities said Monday.

Meanwhile, in Tennessee, authorities announced Monday they were arresting 29 individuals involved in gangs that trafficked underage Somali and African-America girls in a prostitution ring. The 29 people were connected to the Somali Outlaws, the Somali Mafia and the Lady Outlaws, officials said.

The three-day federal sweep, called Operation Cross Country V, involved 40 cities nationwide and is part of the Innocence Lost National Initiative, authorities said.

"Child prostitution continues to be a significant problem in our country, as evidenced by the number of children rescued through the continued efforts of our crimes against children task forces," said Shawn Henry, executive assistant director of the FBI's Criminal, Cyber, Response and Service Branch, in a written statement. "There is no work more important than protecting America's children and freeing them from the cycle of victimization. Through our strategic partnerships with state and local law enforcement agencies, we are able to make a difference."

The city where the most children were recovered was Seattle, Washington, with 16, said FBI Special Agent Jason Pack. Seven pimps were arrested there, he added.

Following Seattle were Tacoma, Washington, and Sacramento, California, each with seven child prostitutes retrieved by authorities, Pack said. Two pimps were arrested in Tacoma and three in Sacramento, he said.

The city with the largest number of pimps arrested was Detroit, with 10, Pack said.

To combat growing child prostitution, federal agencies formed the Innocence Lost National Initiative in June 2003 to address enterprises involved in the domestic sex trafficking of children. Those agencies were the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division, the Department of Justice's Child Exploitation-Obscenity Section and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

There are now 39 Innocence Lost task forces and working groups throughout the country.

So far, those units have recovered 1,250 children, and the initiative has resulted in 438 indictments, 625 convictions, 153 criminal enterprises disrupted and 58 successfully dismantled, authorities said. Convictions have resulted in sentences ranging up to 25-years-to-life and in the seizure of more than $3 million in assets, authorities said.

The most recent sweep, over a 72-hour period ending Sunday night, was the fifth such law enforcement operation, said Pack.

"Once again, Operation Cross Country has awakened the nation to the fact that today American children are being marketed and sold for sex in American cities," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, in a written statement. "These kids are victims. This is 21st century slavery. We are proud to be a part of this extraordinary partnership to rescue children, save lives and bring the pimps and operators to justice."

The FBI says that at least 25 percent of adult prostitutes were enticed into the illegal activity as juveniles.

In Tennessee, federal authorities said the gangs transported the minor girls from Minneapolis, Minnesota, which has a large Somali immigrant community, to Nashville, Tennessee, for prostitution over a 10-year period. Some of the girls were 13 years old or younger.

"I would call this one of the more significant cases that we investigated," said John Morton, director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

people are always shocked to find out that sex traffiking and child prostitution happen right here in the States. it seems the things of movies, Liam Neeson acting out the part of vigilante father, or the by-product of a third-world government -think cambodia or amsterdam. it's easy to forget that this is not a new problem. we are a nation constructed solely on the exploitation of others. people have been our footstools since this great nation was founded. legalized slavery may have ended but slavery itself never stopped. it's merely changed faces. our country, and countless others, continues to be built on the backs of the vulnerable and the voiceless. sometimes, there are no fathers with spy backgrounds desperately seeking to save his daughter. these are kids  with no past, no background, only sometimes no family, and most importantly, no protection. i applaud what has been accomplished here, however this is but a small victory in the war, a war that is far from over, a war for innocence and that stretches across the nations.  

Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire

The British Author - Nancy Mitford (Mrs Peter Rodd) (1904–73)

The Farmer - Pamela Mitford (Mrs Derek Jackson) (1907–94)

The Gay Soldier - Major Thomas Mitford (1909–45) (killed in action)

The Fascist - Diana Mitford ( Lady Mosley) (1910–2003)

The Nazi - Unity Vallkyrie Mitford (1914–48)

The American Author - Jessica Mitford (Mrs Robert Treuhaft) (1917–1996)

The Duchess - Deborah Mitford (now the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire) (born 1920)

.Mitford Sisters.

I currently find myself absolutely fascinated by the Mitford family. From most of my reseach, I'm well behind the curve, but the entire family has individually, and collectively, caught my attention. I originally stumbled across the following article in the NYT and the rest is history...

Andrew & Debo Cavendish



.debo.



By SARAH LYALL
Originally Published: November 5, 2010

EDENSOR, England

YEARS after the fact, Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, looked in her mother’s engagement book to see what had been written on the momentous day of March 31, 1920.

Nothing.

“She didn’t refer to my birth at all,” the duchess said. “There was nothing for five days, and then, on the fifth day, in capital letters, it said ‘KITCHEN CHIMNEY SWEPT.’ ”

“No one took any notice of me except Nanny.”

Maybe so, but not for long. Now 90, the duchess is doubly famous. First, as the lone survivor of the six celebrated Mitford girls, who included Nancy (the renowned comic novelist), Diana (the renowned beauty and wife of the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley) and Jessica (the renowned Communist, author and naturalized American). Second, as the woman who transformed Chatsworth, one of the grandest of England’s grand houses, from a museumlike relic into a family house and self-sustaining business that is visited by 600,000 people a year. Along the way, Deborah Cavendish, to use her civilian name (her friends call her Debo), has become something of a national treasure, as grand as the queen but as approachable as anyone, effortlessly bridging the gap between Us and Them in this perennially class-conscious society.

“It is so kind of you to come all this way,” the duchess said recently, greeting visitors in her driveway. Straight-backed and chic in a deceptively simple green wool skirt and black pumps, she proceeded to shake hands with everyone, including the taxi driver.

She led the way into the drawing room of her house, the former vicarage in this hamlet (pronounced Enzer), part of the 35,000-acre Chatsworth estate. Books were everywhere. Birthday cards filled an entire wall of one room, many reflecting two of her pet passions: chickens (she raises them) and Elvis (she worships him).

Chatsworth loomed outside in the background, grand and imposing with its 297 rooms, its 1.3 acres of roof and its 18 staircases. The duchess had to move out several years ago, after the death of her husband, Andrew, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, and the accession of her son, the 12th. “It was rather a relief because the passages were so long,” she said.

She has written a dozen books, most recently the memoir “Wait For Me!” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which coincides with a Deborah-themed exhibit at Chatsworth. Items include the diary in which she recorded dancing with a young John F. Kennedy (“rather boring but nice”); great swathes of couture clothes and eye-blinding jewels; photographs of her by Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson and Henri Cartier-Bresson; and a portrait by Lucian Freud.

Like all of Freud’s work, the painting was not created to flatter. When her husband first went to see it, there were several other men in the room, the duchess relates in her book. After a while, one said, “Who is that woman?”

“It’s my wife,” Andrew answered.

“Well, thank God it’s not mine,” the man replied.

THE duchess grew up in happy eccentricity in rural Gloucestershire. Her father, the second Baron Redesdale (famous in Nancy Mitford’s fiction as the fearsome Uncle Matthew), had an erratic relationship with finance and a “horror of anything sticky”; hunted his own children with bloodhounds; referred to foreigners and his daughter’s beaux as “sewers”; and hated socializing. (Once, when confronted with a group of Nancy’s guests at lunch, he loudly asked from the far end of the table, “Have these people no home of their own?”)

“I had a marvelous time,” the duchess said. Even when, in a scene in her book, her siblings surrounded her and chanted “Who’s the least important person in the room? You!”?

“It’s hard for people to understand, that these things were all turned into jokes in our family,” she said. Sounding genuinely perplexed, she added: “There is this extraordinary thing called self-esteem which is pumped into the children now.”

She was famously lovely; her husband was famously dashing. He inherited the dukedom only because his older brother, Billy, was killed in World War II. It was a time of constant loss. “Two of my brothers-in-law,” she said. “My only brother; Andrew’s only brother; my four best friends — all killed within a month of each other.”

But her generation believes in self-pity about as much as it believes in self-esteem. “What can you do?” she asked. “Blow after blow came, but there was absolutely no reply, was there?”

AFTER the death of Andrew’s father, in 1959, the tax amounted to 80 percent of the value of the estate — estimated to be about $285 million in today’s money. Nine works of art, including a Holbein, a Rubens and a Rembrandt, went to museums, as did a Van Dyck sketchbook (luckily, someone later “found another in the back of a cupboard,” the duchess writes). The debt was finally settled in 1974.

Raising the money, and making Chatsworth sustainable, required a top-to-bottom reorganization, presided over by the duchess. She put in central heating and plumbing for 17 new bathrooms. She opened an educational farm that is visited by about 200,000 children a year. She opened a farm shop, one of the first of its kind in the country, selling produce and meat from the Chatsworth farm, and later expanding into a restaurant. She opened another shop selling Chatsworth souvenirs.

Her memoir is full of encounters with famous people, including President Kennedy, whose sister Kathleen had been married to Andrew’s older brother before his death in the war (she died several years later in a plane crash). Kennedy, who became a close friend, coincidentally occupied the White House when Andrew’s uncle, Harold Macmillan, was Britain’s prime minister.

Soon, the duchess said, President Kennedy acquired her habit of referring to Macmillan as “Uncle Harold,” and, in calls to Downing Street, liked to follow references to NATO and Seato by inquiring, “How’s Debo?”

Her marriage lasted 62 years, surviving Andrew’s long bout with alcoholism, as well as his discreet dalliances.

“It was absolutely fixed that we shouldn’t divorce or get rid of each other in any way,” the duchess said. “It’s completely different to Americans, who all divorce each other the whole time. Such a bore for everyone, having to say who’s going to have the dogs, who’s going to have the photograph books.”

Andrew was great company, she said, which went a long way, and he shared his wife’s facility for drawing humor from challenging situations. Being married to a Mitford, he once said, “inevitably imposes a certain Denis Thatcher element in my life.”

THE duchess has always been a great letter writer; volumes of her correspondence with her sisters and with the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor have recently been published. Now, she is besieged by letters from members of the public. She always answers.

She picked up a thick stack of mail.

“It’s because they know where I live,” she said. “That’s the trouble.”

Inevitably, she has slowed down. Her brilliant blue eyes are slightly dimmer now, and she suffers from macular degeneration, which allows her to write but not read. By way of illustration, she pointed to the photographer. “I can’t see his features,” she said, “He’s just a very amiable sponge.”

She paused. “Haven’t we had enough?” she said, making it somehow sound gracious.

As it happened, the same taxi driver arrived to take the visitors away and was treated to a second sight of the duchess, this time waving goodbye.

“That were the duchess, weren’t it?” he asked, recalling the thrill he got years ago when, taking his family on an outing to the Chatsworth farm, he spotted her feeding her chickens. “We all love her to bits.”