This Just In: Artists can use the Internet to Create, Publish Stuff

It's time to revolutionize the blog and social media. It's time to meld them to the desires of the creative. Just as the Industrial Revolution was initially intended to propel industry and commercialism, it also made it possible for words and paints and other creative tools and materials to be made faster, cheaper, easier, and reach further to far off places -- more people can find it, afford it, create using it. Google is having its midlife crisis and Facebook is getting ready for the prom. What's next? What toddler roams the ethers that will rule the world next? Some can guess, but none can know for sure. But what is absolutely certain: whatever the "new wave" is, it is guaranteed to be some form of social media and networking.

The idea of the HomeTree in Avatar is starting to seem less and less fictional, even down to the way it looks. Souls gathering around one central hub of nerves and receptors aglow with activity. People still refer to Facebook as "TimeSuck" and all sorts of other things, but look what's happening -- the whole world is on at the same time, on their laptops or their smartphones, or whatever. The constant updates and feedback, even when humorous or regarding your hatred of hairbands, all add something where once there was nothing.

We are now at the point in social media history where some monk was hundreds of years ago: HOLD THE PHONE GIDEON! WE CAN PRINT THE SAME PSALM 100 FUCKING TIMES WITHOUT A QUILL! Magic. How will we use it? Will we be too scared to be the same kind of artist on the virtual stage that we are in our journals or in the makeshift studio we built in our garages and basements? Now that the world can see into your bedroom window, will you still take your bra off for the cute boy next door? Social media and the insane viral power of networking through plugins will mean the best and the worst of you will be waving in the universal wind. Can you do it?

I say fuck it. For all I've lost, it will not be for nothing.

To all the creatives out there: GET NAKED and let social media rollercoaster your sweet ass across the universe so the rest of us can appreciate it.

R.I.P. Guru -- thanks for the wisdom and the music.

Quieres que te Enseno? Pues Vamonos.

after years of having known someone you think you know them, then you have a child with a brown person and they pretend they feel the same until from time to time a racist comment comes out.

worst part: i've been Latina my whole life, but no one knows until i scream it into their ear. so my baby is as white as i am, but her father, and the man i love who i would never trade for any other man is the color of a Louis Vuitton bag. his last name is Prado. my last name since birth has been Diaz -- not exactly fucking Cunningham.

and then someone i've known for years says he can't get work in this town because the fucking Mexicans are underbidding him. fine. then he says another day that a Mexican stole his tools. fine. then he says he'd do anything they do for money if ONLY it was available to him, but it's not because of the Mexicans. DONE.

hahaha/Mexicans will do anything for cash! Mexicans are the new nigger! hahaha!!! people of color should not underbid me -- hilarious! when's the movie coming out!

listen here and listen close, so close you can smell the Modelo on my breath and feel my husband's Mexican sweat on my skin, so close you can see all the black neighbors that kept me from dropping a toaster into my bathtub, so close you can see the pupils of my eyes that will tell you my godfather is a Muslim, so close, so close.

MY womb harbored a Mexican child and she is more beautiful than the whole world, the entire universe.

In a way i hope this makes you uncomfortable. white as the driven snow, your judgments are safe until you're surprised. SURPRISE!

your hate will carry you nowhere. it's more distasteful than wearing fur. beyond that, you just can't be cosmopolitan and racist. and beyond that, however beautiful your soul is, no one can see it through your retarded scope if you're racist.

would you wear a t-shirt that says, "People that don't share my genealogy are lesser"?

if you'll wear that fucking shirt to the Coffee Bean and to your cocktail parties I'll have it made for you on my dime.

if you still feel the same and won't wear the shirt, we know who you are. and just so you know, us primitive minorities make up more of the GDP than Anglos. chew on that while you call your gardener a wetback.




--La Tierra de la Cha Cha Cha siempre te recordare!

If Morrissey wasn't a celibate gay Catholic we'd be so perfect together

"Only stone and steel accept my love." Oh Moz, you're fine wine.

Why am I so Angry?

Well, the question has been a quest. I was raised up in a house with a mother who is of Scottish decent and a father who is Cuban by birth [as in he was actually born in Cuba, and my brother and I are first generation Cuban Americans.] My mother's upbringing held a silent tidal wave of communication -- anything that needed to be said was avoided at every turn, and the family was pretty much a collection of passive people.

My father, on the other hand, was raised by a family that was the polar opposite -- anything and everything was yelled, screamed, or otherwise doled out extremely clearly in tones that those of us who are Anglo would clearly classify as angry, or at least way too loud, way too emotional.

It is not my right to delve into what my father experienced as a youth, except to say that he lost his country. completely and without choice. unfairly and uncontrollably. If you don't know what happened to Cuba in the late 1950s, rent the movie "The Lost City." My father was shipped to the U.S. He was paired with a loving adoptive family, yet he spent much of his life in silence due to his inability at the time to speak English [he now speaks English better than anyone I know, and that's a HUGE mouthful.]

So many years of learning in silence, the death of his father in his arms, the reconnection with his baby brother who had ended up in another foster house, and working like a slave to afford university embittered him. He was angry. He had plenty to be angry for.

In my years being raised by my father, we had plenty of scuffles. Mainly because we were so similar. It was like looking into a mirror he wanted to crack -- and the feeling was mutual.

On Christmas, 1984, my father bought me a music box that played Edelweiss -- the anthem of Austria and a song from the Sound of Music, perhaps my favorite movie of all time. I had the music box until 2006 when it was destroyed when my garage flooded in Claremont, CA.

My anger is very personal, except that everyone who knows me deeply thinks that I am an angry person. I myself -- until recently -- have agreed with this assumption. But I am not angry. Yes, I have a short fuse, but much like the early years of my life listening to my father, all the things I have a short fuse about are just things that I yell about, that I talk shit about, that I unburden myself with by becoming vocal. After all, I have seen first-hand what NOT being vocal can do when you feel upset, over-stimulated, or stressed -- it's not exactly worth the payoff to make a vocally angry person convert.

I have realized that all the things that have made me extremely angry through the years have been diminished significantly. And though I have made a pact with myself to get completely naked on this blog, some things are sacred and not to be shared. Let's just say I had good reasons to be angry, and my time spent in anger felt right and served me well. It got me through high school and university, it got me through a lot worse. My anger was the cloak I threw around who I really was so that people could generally pigeon-hole me as "the angry funny girl." But I have come to realize that a lot of what I was angry about are not things I am angry about anymore, yet I cling to the short fuse and yelling because it's simply how I was raised. There's not really a lot of anger behind it, it's just a habit.

But I will always root for the violent upholder of the truth -- even though I love Gandhi, MLK, and others who believed in and practiced non-violence. I am the person people cannot believe is still alive because I simply have no fear of other humans [I am so afraid of scorpions I pee my pants when I see one but that's beside the point... sort of.] For example, when I lived on Crenshaw, more than once I came across characters I should have walked away from, called the cops on, not yelled at, or run away from at lightning speed. But I can say in all honesty that I never did, and I don't say this as a point of pride per se, but to make a point of who I am and who I shall always be. Thugs don't scare me. People who have just been released from prison don't scare me. The streets of LA don't scare me  [I lived in the HOOD, the real HOOD, not the "omg you guys, that was kinda scary, Heather! Hood.]

This is a blessing and a curse. But no one ever fucked with me. EVER. Even when a guy twice my size with teardrop tattoos on his face stole my parking spot I told that fucker what was up. He could have killed me, but something tells me he sensed my sense of self, and that at that time, I'd have sooner died [literally] than give in just because he was big and scary... to most people. When I looked at him all I saw was the motherfucker who stole my spot, and nothing else.

So yeah, my anger has served me because it lets off an aura of serious dominance, and even when a guy outside a liquor store tried to follow me as I walked home at 1:45AM, I turned around and asked him what the fuck he wanted, and he receded into the background. I assure you, if I had gassed it up the road he'd have raped me. NO fucking doubt in my mind.

But those days are over. I have a child that I will protect like a mama bear, and that means choosing my battles and not tangling with fuckers, unless they are harming her.

Perhaps the reason my Dad bought me that music box was because it was the gentlest song about loving your homeland he could find. He was/is so angry and sad about that loss, and he should be. Until you have held your father in your arms and tried to tell him that this place is good because he never would have met your mother, you can't tell me you know this pain, and you can't judge it even when it becomes absurd, even when you've heard the story thousands of times.

My anger is mine, my father is my Edelweiss, and I am his homeland. God bless the anger that preserved us, and God bless the will to let it go.

The Path of Most Resistance

Why do we choose the hard way even when the easy way is presented at the exact same time? I have been asking myself this question for years because I am the kind of person who nearly always chooses to learn the hard way and I really have no idea why. I have a divorce under my belt, a history of kicking, screaming, and scratching my way through college and university, a need to have 47 pets at a time because I have caretaker syndrome. I have an adoring babydaddy who while amazing and lovely comes from a completely and insanely different culture which has complicated the hell out of both our lives, yet we chose it and walked eyes wide open into the madness with our chins up and smiles across our faces.

Why did I not stay the easy road and stick with the Jewish doctor (every mother's dream, right!) I had married? BECAUSE IT LOOKED EASIER FROM THE OUTSIDE WHILE MY SOUL WAS BEING EATEN BY THE PARASITIC DISEASE OF DELUSION.

So I think it's sometimes easier to take the harder road if that makes any sense. I chose to walk a tightrope with no net underneath, but let me tell you, the net I could have had there was fraught with razorblades and hard alcohol.

If you're one of those who is smart enough to take the easy road to keep your life from getting messy, go easy on those who choose the path of most resistance. After all, the human touch and a caring word can keep a person on the low road uplifted for days.

And for you travelers on the tightrope, remember: falling to your death is better than falling into emptiness.