6/25/13

HAS THE PRIVACY INVASION SCANDAL MADE YOU PARANOID ABOUT BLOGGING?

HAS THE PRIVACY INVASION SCANDAL MADE YOU PARANOID ABOUT BLOGGING?

6/23/13

EXCERPT: WOULD IT KILL YOU TO STOP DOING THAT? A MODERN GUIDE TO MANNERS : HENRY ALFORD

WOULD IT KILL YOU TO STOP DOING THAT?  A MODERN GUIDE TO MANNERS : HENRY ALFORD
Book is C 2012 Henry Alford
Twelve is Publisher






Page 100


"The true devil's candy of business e-mail, of course, is forwarding. If the essential piece of information to be gleaned here is "Never send any message to a business e-mail address that you'd be embarrassed to have the whole company read," a helpful addendum would be ... "Or anyone else, for that matter." In 2001, the CEO of a Kansas City- based health care information tenchology firm called Cerner Corporation sent an angry w-mail to his managers about his employees' work habits...The message was forwarded all the way to Yahoo's message board, where Wall Street saw it and assumed that Cerner was in trouble. In the blink of an eye, the company's stock had dropped 29 percent. Over the course of three days, the stock price fell from about forty-four dollars a share to thirty-four."

6/17/13

"ART 4 U" INTIMATE PERFORMANCE ADVENTURES IN DRESSING ROOMS JUST AMAZING! PAT PAYNE

ART 4 U     NEW TOWN ARTS ORG link!

This past Saturday, while in the North Hollywood Arts District, Gracie and I saw a big dressing room van parked outside the Avery Shrieber theater. Turned out the dressing rooms were containing three actresses, each who were doing very intimate theatre.  Gracie and I mounted the steps into the dressing room of actress PAT PAYNE.  Her presentation was called MY OWN PERSONAL WEATHER SYSTEM.

I've never experienced anything like it, it was very out of the box creative, art, performance art, and theater all at the same time, and I want you to know that there will be more performances in Sherman Oaks this coming Saturday June 23, 2013 at 14209 Ventura Blvd.  Sherman Oaks CA  91403 next to Guitar Center.  (I believe that if you have the time you can see all three performances.  These will be by men.)

PAY PAYNE had her dressing room hot and wore a bright pink see through plastic dress - she's in a unitard underneath.  She wanted you to feel hot too because her act was a bit of performance art as well as artistic installation about menopause.  She created a wall of prescription bottles hanging on clear thread like a room divider, had a table of speculums representing all the gynecological exams she had in her life, and had on display a contruction of her pre-menopause perky breasts in their own theater.  Using one of the clear plastic speculums in hand she went to an installation of her eggs, of which one was viable.

Since feedback was more than welcome, we had a woman to woman talk, which I included Gracie, my dog, in.  Gracie sat on my lap smiling the whole time.   You see she is spayed so in dog menopause.  I was telling Pat how people have talked to me about adopting a dog, especially if they have figured it out that I'm childless by choice myself.

People have said things to me like,"Why don't you adopt a child?"  They assume that because Gracie is cute small and fluffy that she is not just well cared for but SPOILED. (So what if Gracie thinks my name is Mummie?) 

The best thing is that I left feeling I had made a (rare) connection with another human being!

So check out the web site for NEW TOWN ARTS ORG and head over to Sherman Oaks next Saturnday!

6/16/13

KEEPING THINGS WHOLE by MARK STRAND

I saw this poem posted along with new poetry books at a public library, and the posting didn't mention what book or books it is from.  Mark Strand owns the copyright.

KEEPING THINGS WHOLE

by Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Whenever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

6/14/13

DIANE DUANE Quote

"Reading one book is like eating one potato chip."  - Diane Duane

6/12/13

THE JOY OF FINDING TYPOS AND SPELLING ERRORS ON THE INTERNET by CHRISTINE TRZYNA

THE JOY OF FINDING TYPOS AND SPELLING ERRORS ON THE INTERNET by CHRISTINE TRZYNA

I remember back when I had to type on a typewriter for a short fiction class I was taking at a local community college at night.  Oh I loved that class most of the time.  I really worked hard at that class.  I enjoyed reading and critiquing other people's work and usually I enjoyed reading what other people (characters) had to say about my submissions.  There were a few stinkers in that class.  Mostly self righteous with the tweedy jackets and elbow patches and pipes of the east coast though this is California or some such thing.

It was all supposed to be anonymous but let's face it, some of us became visible nervous wrecks hearing other people talk about our work which was telling.  I tended to bounce my foot.

So one time I submitted a story and the worst critique of it was that I had spelled a word wrong - the same word repeatedly.

I don't know about you but I have about a half dozen words that somehow got into my brain spelled wrong and to this day I struggle to spell them right, and so I use spell check to catch these words.

Well, I was a bit embarrassed but more THE ENTIRE STORY WAS DISMISSED as WORTHLESS because of my spelling error.  What about the content?  The theme?  The dialogue?

So these days, I read more on the Internet, and I notice lots of spelling errors that Internet Journalists did not have the time to notice.  My guess is the race for beating deadlines or competiting with other journalists to submit is the real cause.  Still I take joy in finding those mistakes.  AND I KNOW THAT THE CONTENT IS STILL IMPORTANT as is the CREATIVITY and the RESEARCH and the INTERVIEWING and all else that makes a story great!

6/9/13

DIANA VREELAND : THE EYE HAS TO TRAVEL : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

There's a book out by the same name, I believe, and this is the film documentary.  Looooved it!





As someone who has never been really fashionable, who tends towards comfort, and finds herself impossible to fit - shoes being especially impossible. As someone who hates nylons and has never worn a suit that felt right and can't afford made to order, you might think I have no interest in fashion.  But I do.

I embrace fashion for the creativity and skill it takes to create clothing for individuals and the masses and the designers we know about for their fortitude for the world of fashion is vicious and it seems a miracle that anyone makes it to the top and more a miracle that they stay on top.  I study fashion and try to understand it from fabrics and construction up.

Diana Vreeland was not a fashion designer but a fashion magazine editor - Harper's Bazaar for 25 years - and was what we call "a force of nature."  She got herself hired by the fashion editor Carmel Snow, and her eccentricity and very original world view, her demands for telling detail on the often magnificent photography that took the viewer/reader on a journey are legendary, seemingly entirely narcissic, yet her ideas worked, they sold, they changed history in their way.

Vreeland felt that people were nothing if they didn't have style, their own style.  Hers was heavily influenced by Japan and Russia.

This documentary is jam packed with fashion, some you think you remember and some you will remember for seeing it for the first time.  Twiggy for instance.  Cher.  Women who she felt were beyond models.  Jackie O.

However what I will take away with me most is this; Diana Vreeland saw fashion photoshoots as stories.  She often coached photographers and models to imagine that story.  The eye travels to locations all over the world, over the body and face of the model for what the language and emotions are, and you as a viewer/reader will travel too.

C Christine Trzyna  All Rights Reserved 2013

6/6/13

VISITING JAM MY SENIOR FRIEND

I made a surprise visit to my senior friend JAM recently. 

I met him maybe 6 years ago when I was friend with a friend of his, a woman poet.  The elderly woman used to take walks around my neighborhood and when I engaged her, she recited short lovely poems to me, poems she was proud of and wanted to publish.  Our first conversations were about putting together a chap book (usually a small book published by the person or an editor meant for small distribution, like at poetry readings at coffee houses or art galleries, often free or for the cost of printing.)  She wanted her only grandson to have her intellectual property rights.

I have a soft spot for seniors who are alone in life, without living or local family to look in on them. 

The woman poet only had her grandson and Jam, who with his wife, had been this couple's best friends.  The woman poet died several months after I began visiting and phoning her frequently.  She was dying of cancer and had not yet been told the truth, though she suspected.  I was with her the night before she died, and met her grandson only then. 

JAM was also depressed not only because he was surrounded in a senior living place with people who were dealing with illness or dying, because of the death of his wife, who he had known and been married to over 60 years!  Now in his 90's JAM is my "oldest" friend, but because he does have family to look in on him (people I will probably never meet) I don't visit with him as often.

JAM's way out of his depression was WRITING.  He joined several senior - oriented writing clubs and classes and recorded mostly memoirs some of his short stories or chapters published.

This visit he surprised me by pulling out his Barnes and Noble NOOK! JAM bragged that he might be ready to go but he always kept up with technology and with this NOOK he was able to access Los Angeles Public Library and download books.  He had read near 40 in the last several months on the NOOK.  He surprised me by telling me he didn't like non-fiction especially not history, and naming his favorite writers of suspense, mystery, and murder.  Since he is slowing down physically, this has saved him the hardship of walking with a cane to take public transportation to the library.


UPDATE OCTOBER 2016  ...JAM DIED THIS PAST SPRING...

6/5/13

THEY DIDN'T PAY ME TO SAY THIS!

Trader Joes' Cheddar and Horseradish potato chips are terrific... and I never eat horseradish.

They have a bite to them and a zing of an aftertaste!

6/2/13

I CAN'T KEEP MY OWN SECRET : SIX WORD MEMOIRS BY TEENS A NEW POETRY

Remember straining to write a haiku?  Severe boundaries (from another - Japanese culture) sometimes bring out beauty and eliminates BS.



If you want to laugh and maybe even find a tear in your eye,  try I CAN'T KEEP MY OWN SECRETS, SIX WORD MEMOIRS by TEENS FAMOUS AND OBSCURE edited by Smith Magazine. (Some of these are actually memoirs.)







A selection:

Jesus saves, my ass,  comma justified. -  Hali H.



Afraid I'm crazy, Bell Jar style. - Annikka T.



I found hope in clinical depression. - Jonathan E.



Read the thesaurus on the toilet. - Dan R.

6/1/13