slova has moved to: http://slova.tumblr.com/

and i also have one about that time of the month: http://thecottonpony.tumblr.com

YERP.///

He who overcomes others is strong, but he who overcomes himself is mighty.

-Tao Te Ching

Lao Zi Statue in Qhanzhou

Day 12 of not smoking. Feeling a bit overwhelmed with the amount of work at my job and the tight deadline for two presentations due the day after Thanksgiving. I am so happy that I get to visit my sister and her family in PA but I have to buckle down even harder this weekend to complete everything. I just need to make it through November…

Great Migrations

It’s Day 10 of me not smoking. Big whoop, right?

People don’t think of me as being a heavy smoker. I almost never smoked in the morning, at work even and sometimes went through the evening without a cigarette. I smoke socially, I would say. And think. The truth is, however, that I smoked a lot. I would smoke when I drank. I smoked when other friends smoked around me. I smoked in the car when boyfriend lit up. I smoke when I wanted a break from a stressful situation or even to pass the time when I was bored waiting for something.  If you take away all the tiny triggers, the big one for me is “going out.”  A cigarette and a drink, man.

Getting through a few days without a cigarette is something I have done before, but getting through nights out with friends without smoking is a small success for me. And I have done it THREE times already in the course of my ten day cessation.

One other tiny success that I will mention is that on Day 3, I had a required speech to present in my public speaking class. If there was ever a time I would want a smoke, it’s then. But I made it through. And I got an A. Hooray!

[The impetus for me to quit was silly, really. I went to Fun Fun Fun Fest and got sick, as I always do, from the dusty park and all the smoking. That and I have been saying I want to for months.]

I don’t feel magical at all having quit. I am still hacking and coughing and wheezing. In fact my asthma has flared up. But I know that it’s better. And my breath is better. And my clothes smell better. And food smells and tastes better. So that’s something.

I hear it takes 28 days to really break a habit. Dec 5th is that day for me.

Seeing Polvo, Os Mutantes and Yelle were the highlights of my weekend but I also managed to see these badasses:

A-Trak
Best Coast
Big Freedia
Deerhunter
Delorean
Descendants
Devin the Dude (4th time to see him this year. 5th time free?)
Dam Funk
Gwar
High on Fire
Jean Grae
Mastadon
MGMT
RJD2
Slick Rick
Pharaohe Monch
Toro y Moi

Hooray, music festivals!  But I gotta tell ya: my absolute favorite gem of the weekend wasn’t at the festival. I caught Bon-Jay at the Beauty Bar Friday night and that girl’s voice cut through me with sex-lasers.

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Originally uploaded by imidge

@ La Zona Rosa in Austin, TX on 10/31/2010

This year was different.

I had a really great Halloween weekend. I went to a Lost Boys-themed party that DID NOT SUCK on Friday. On Saturday, I went to a warehouse party that also DID NOT SUCK.  Having been satisfied with the “Halloweening” the weekend had offered me thus far, a friend and I decided to simply watch scary movies, make pumpkin pie and give candy to kids on Halloween. Super chill. Halloween-ish, at least, with minimal energy required.  Because forcing holiday celebrations is ridonkulous.

AND THEN.

After watching, “The Crazies” (which is worth it for the scary CAR WASH scene, but overall SPOILER ALERT: military biochemical spill=masochistic murdering zombie townspeople) by a stroke of good fortune on the interweb I came across an event page that said Die Antwoord was playing that very night in my very own town in only 2 hours! Oh ghoulish delight! Oh spooky pleasures!  Even though we had spent all of our laundry money on candy for the kids, we had to go. We took the pies out of the oven, slapped some party clothes on, dropped the credit card down and took the ride to the Zef Side.]

Die Antwoord’s performance at La Zona Rosa was one of the best concert experiences I have had in a very long time.

Even though I nearly suffocated in the packed crown up front and even though one of Ninja’s crowd dives ended up bruising my head, the rush of excitement from finally seeing this South African music group paired with the enthusiasm from all of the other concert goers would have been enough to go on. But the performance of Ninja and Yo Landi Visser was majik.

“F&$% the upper class!” she yelled and the crowd backed her up during “Rich Bitch.”  

The two taught the crowd a supposed childhood taunt-phrase: “Jou mae se poes in a fispaste jar” which means “your mother’s private parts in a fish paste jar.”

Vulgar, disgusting, irreverent, endearing.

Some of the elements of that make up Die Antwoord’s style are summed up by Yo Landi’s explanation of Zef in an article from the UK’s Guardian:

“Zef’s kind of like you don’t give a f–k and you have your own flavour and you’re on your own mission,” says Yolandi. “It’s associated with people who soup their cars up and rock gold and shit. Zef is, you’re poor but you’re fancy. You’re poor but you’re sexy, you’ve got style.”

The Die Antwoord FaceBook profile has a photo album of dedicated fans rocking Yo Landi’s or Ninja’s hairstyles and track suits.

The modern, trashy appeal of Die Antwoord is spreading like HOT FIRE.  

Best. Halloween. Ever.

Long Performing Arts Center - Patio

In 2006, I posted about seeing Sufjan Stevens at the Paramount.
 
Earlier this week, I was fortunate to attend Sufjan Stevens’ performance in Austin at the Long Center.This was my first trip ever to the Long Center and it is gorgeous. I highly recommend going here for a show.
 
Sufjan’s performance this time around was raw compared to the put-togetherness of the last tour I witnessed. Don’t get me wrong, his performance is still polished – he’s a music-composing genius. But as he himself said during the performance, he has begun to experiment with machines, loop pedals, even playing with autotune (hilarious!) in combination with the usual horns, drums, and strings. His delicate, innocent voice was paired with dark, digital synths. It made me giddy to see that he was reaching into this electronic experimentation.  The “Chicago” wunderkind told the audience that he was happy to share his cathartic “psychotherapy session” while he worked some things out during Impossible Soul: “…love, heartache and the Apocalypse.”
 
(The two dancers and (very-talented) backup singers, danced their butts off throughout the entire show. Sufjan himself broke out into half-choreographed, half-freestyle dance sesh during the dance jam part of Impossible Soul.) 

Future City by Royal Robertson

 What really cut me to the core during this performance, what begged my heartswell: The visuals during the show that were inspired by “outsider artist” and self-proclaimed prophet, Royal Robertson.

 [There is something magical about those who have been deemed outsider artists. Many suffer from paranoid schizophrenia and therefore have reclusive lives that make their art inaccessible during their lifetimes and are revealed to us only after their deaths. I am struck much the same way by Henry Darger. Don't EVEN get me started!]

Robertson said that he was visited by God driving a spaceship when he was fourteen years old. And while he drove his family and friends away because of his mental illness, he produced mesmerizing images of space, monsters, women, landscapes with a futuristic and comic-book quality.  The pieces deal with his heartache, numerology, the cosmos, and the Apocalypse….
 
Sufjan Stevens’ new album Age of Adz was inspired in part, he said, by the art and story of Royal Robertson. Read Pitchfork’s writeup on Sufjan Steven’s Age of Adz tour.

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Postscript: You can take a free listen to the album here.

I can’t turn the lights on immediately because I don’t want to wake the BF. He works late and wakes up later than I do.

I plan on sitting straight up tomorrow morning and drinking a glass of water immediately.  The adventure of trying to wake up earlier continues…

Do you have a favorite morning song to get you up and at ‘em?