Sunday, January 30, 2005


Gabrielle carefully choreographed this photo. Note the hand in the background.  Posted by Hello


This photo is basically the story of our lives. I'm worried, Gabrielle is goofy and Irene is directing.  Posted by Hello


Papa and baby Posted by Hello


Mom and Baby Posted by Hello


Mom and baby Posted by Hello


Auntie Kristine Posted by Hello


Grandpa Patel Posted by Hello


Grandma Patel Posted by Hello


Grandma Pipilas Posted by Hello

Saturday, January 29, 2005


Um, who the hell are you? Posted by Hello


I want mommy part 2 Posted by Hello


I want mommy Posted by Hello


Big Sister Posted by Hello


Frightening my son with the flash Posted by Hello


Right after the event Posted by Hello


Young Atticus Hilesh Patel. Is it me or does he look Burgess Meredith, Jeff Tweedy and the hindu god Krishna all rolled into one? Posted by Hello

Thursday, January 27, 2005

It seems since the comments tab has left my blog, more comments have come my way. This is a response to a previous comment by the lovely and amazing Kent from the equally admirable Chris Donaldson:

>>1. You're only as good as your last hit single.

True. Additionally, there is always going to be that song that is
unbelievably popular, that you are going to be sick of, that the
masses will want to hear again and again. Play it anyway, and then
get on with your own good thing.

>>2. US Weekly over People mag. Hands down.

Also true, but Entertainment Weekly over both of them...

>>3. It's never to late to start thinking about next season's hairstyle.

But if you find something that works, stick with it. Look at Trump.
Dude has got an orange marmoset on his head, has forever, and yet for
some reason, noone has told him...

>>4. You're daddy's cool.

And again, all too true. But I've seen Daddy in a dress. And, not
bad, not bad at all...

from my lovely and dear friend Kent explaining why baby hasn't arrived yet:

The reason baby's so late is because the
little one is with me right now. I'm giving baby a few pointers on the
workings of the world before the delivery. Things like:

1. You're only as good as your last hit single.
2. US Weekly over People mag. Hands down.
3. It's never to late to start thinking about next season's hairstyle.
4. You're daddy's cool.

My comments page is all messed up. I don't know how to fix it. Jon tried to leave a comment but it was gone by then so I'm posting it here. It's a response to the 1-20-05 entry "I'm downloading one my favorite.....". Here it is.

"Even if you don?t believe that there is such a thing as ?television
addiction,? Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi have compiled some
startling statistics about our viewing habits: they found that ?on
average, individuals in the industrialized world devote three hours a
day? to watching television, which is half of their total leisure time.
We spend more time watching television than doing anything else but
sleeping and working. Using an ?Experience Sampling Method? to track
people?s feelings about television, Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi found
that people watching TV reported ?feeling relaxed and passive,? a state
that electroencephalograph studies of TV watchers have supported;
viewers experience ?less mental stimulation, as measured by alpha
brain-wave production, during viewing than during reading.? This
pleasurable sense of relaxation ends as soon as the TV is turned off;
what doesn?t end is ?passivity and lowered alertness.?

Why is this the case? One explanation is a biological condition called
the ?orienting response,? which Ivan Pavlov identified in 1927. As the
Scientific American study notes, ?the orienting response is our
instinctive visual or auditory reaction to any sudden or novel
stimulus,? and includes the dilation of blood vessels to the brain and
the slowing of the heart. Researchers such as Byron Reeves of Stanford
University and Esther Thorson of the University of Missouri have
studied brainwaves to determine how television activates the orienting
response and found that it does so with great facility; this explains
why some people lament that they can?t not watch a television when it
is on. Babies as young as six weeks have been found to attend to the
images flashing across the TV screen. ?In ads, action sequences, and
music videos, formal features frequently come at a rate of one per
second, thus activating the orienting response continuously,?
Scientific American notes."

data.src:

title: The Age of Egocasting
dvr: Christine Rosen
uri: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/7/rosen.htm

[talk/type] soon
//jC

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Today is the due date but alas there is no baby in sight. Playing hide and go seek.

My head doesn't feel like it's screwed on right. Two days of chemo and I'm all back to the starting point. That's what it feels like. Getting back up on your feet and someone comes and knocks you down for two days. Then you gotta get back up and get normal again, get ready to be knocked down. But there are only six treatments left and all my friends at the hospital are in worse shape than me so I know better than to complain too much. I know how blessed I am.

Thursday, January 20, 2005


archer Posted by Hello


staff Posted by Hello


gabrielle's inspiration Posted by Hello


hera Posted by Hello


goddesses Posted by Hello

I'm downloading one of my favorite songs of all time, hopefully it will be here before five and I can listen to it. Lisa Slodki put it on a mix tape for me years ago. It was my birthday mix and the three successive songs I always remember are, in order, u-ziq - hasty boom alert, james - lullaby and love & rockets - everybody wants to go to heaven. The last on is the one I am downloading.

I was talking with Sissy today about life and love and within the bubble of our conversation I talked about two people taking each other down different journeys - each one taking the other - down an external journey and down an internal one. Obviously it's never that cut and paste but the looking back on a lifetime aspect of it, the two personalities pushing and pulling, is nice. There are points in a relationship, romantic or not, points on a contour map not a linear one, where you go head to head with each other and in depending on how you deal with it, the situation, the conflict, the accumulation of what is never said, that can lead you down different maps, different contours. You may stick together and bond more or you may break, even drift apart slowly. I don't mean to sound so...negative. I don't mean it like that at all. I mean, looking back, the contours outline themselves against your memory and you begin to see risings and fallings like frozen breaths. It's nice. It's retrospective, introspective and melancholic and joyful all at once.

Gabrielle and Irene and I all watched Wimbledon last night. The movie not the event. And at one point Gabs gets up and goes to my desk and spends the rest of the evening drawing. Which struck me because she rarely gets up from watching TV but the pull of it got her and she drew and drew and I smiled and smiled.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

I am getting progressively sicker. They did my weekly blood tests and found out my white cell count is in the red, way low as well as my other counts. Names I don't understand: A/G, Bilirubin, RBC, MCV, MCH, MCHC.

If I get too sick then they have to admit me which I don't want because there is a strong potential that I could miss the birth. MISS IT!!!

Found an intriguing local artist. Mentally working on the next series of paintings, using stencils to layer and layer, see what effect that has. Reading the short stories of Reinaldo Arenas and a crime novel by George Pelecanos and Jitterbug Perfume which my friend Yasemen sent me.

Working on a poem, but it's a sort of love poem and it gets a little too dreamy for me but Mikey, my ever trusting editor, says it works. It's a little too bleak. I need to re-work it.



Roots

1.

I brush the hair from your shoulder

Your bare back faces me

I lean back, afraid

To touch your skin

I could melt into it &

Hide my face. What

Will you be when your shoulders

Ease from their stern position

When your face absorbs the world?

When you turn around to look at me

Will you still breathlessly smile?

Could I have met you when my brown bare arms

Smelled of paprika and daylight? Would you

Have hit me across the face and pulled my hair?

I would have touched your shoulder even then.

2.

You put my hands on your hips

And walk ahead

My pebble eyes watch you

Slip into a waterfall

But you disappear behind a wall

I cannot enter these dreams with you

Dust rises up and closes me like a tent

My grin is swept away.

3.

We move now

With the trees

With the old ladies walking to get fruit

With the gangster boys bouncing in the front lawn

And their girls easing back into Cadillac leather

With the moths that land on our mouths in the middle of the night

We move now

You work in the salon

Eyes agape, lost hair on the floor

I move with the city

Spreading like an oil spill

Our children rain upon the concrete

And bounce back to our arms.

Underneath suns of every hour

We move with the trees to Cadillac beatboxes

And reach out to each other barely touching

4.

I pull your sweater over your head

And scratch the side of your face

I absently kiss your breasts

I look up with your face flush

And one streak of war paint




Monday, January 17, 2005

I just can't make the words come out today. It's all heart and no sense of the writing. All the poems sound like grand standing movie trailers. It sounds good tap tapping it out but without a sense of what's getting outputted.


They only met once, at the US Senate debate of the Civil Rights Bill on March 26th 1964. Posted by Hello

Saturday, January 15, 2005

I did something bad today.

Well not exactly bad, per se, but, I guess, kind of juvenile.

Gabrielle does this thing that drives me crazy. She'll say, "I have that movie on DVD. I have that cd. I have that movie." It can go on and on forever. Normally I do the patient adult thing and nod and say, "That's nice dear" but today I brought her to work with me and we have a Morrissey You are the Quarry poster and she sees it and says, "I have that cd."

Me: "Oh yeah? Where?"

Gabs: "At my grandma's. I love it."

Me: "Oh yeah? You know that song you love from Charmed called How Soon Is Now? (I sing it for her) Well, Morrissey sang that first way before that show a long time ago in a band called The Smiths and I have all their records and all his. I was listening to them since I was your age (So not true)."

And she just kid of looks at me says, "Oh."

I am so juvenile.

Friday, January 14, 2005

I've never been the biggest Clint Eastwood fan. Ever since Absolute Power (of which I thought the title referred to the lead character's absolute paternal power but that's another post altogether) he's left a sour taste in my mouth. And Mystic River was so bombastic it might as well have been a Soundgarden video. Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote what I think is the best review of it so far of it.

But all my heart aches to see Million Dollar Baby. I don't know if it's Hilary Swank or if it's Morgan Freeman's gravitas but there is a still a large part of me that sits alone in a dark movie theater and believes in it, the movie. It seems like that kind of movie, what the native americans used to call film: the white man's magic.

I was talking with Lisa and doing one of my I'm low on energy and sad so I'm going to bring this conversation down and you with it deals. I felt so bad when I got off the phone that I fretted then Mikey comes over and plays me three Ryan Adams tracks. Now, I hate Ryan Adams. And it's always been this thing between us that we could both hate Ryan Adams because he's such a cocky motherfucker so I honestly felt betrayed when he told me "I came to the conclusion a few weeks ago, after spending some alone time with 'Love Is Hell', that Ryan Adams (although he's a cock) is the Real Deal. One of the best most honest beautiful albums I've heard since Jeff Buckley's Grace. So there you go."

But I love Mikey so I gave it a go and his cover of Wonderwall along with The Shadowlands and English Girls off his Love is Hell album nearly made me cry so there you go. He's still an asshole. But I love those songs.

So for what's it worth, Lisa, I'm sending positive vibes your way via the mostly unlikely source, a cocky rocker who writes beautiful songs.

It's Friday. I keep waking up at six. Every morning. Since the surgery, especially since the chemotherapy I wake up full of anxiety. I tried for awhile to blame it on the dog, Stella does wake up early and starts whimpering but no matter how tired I am I sit up look at the clock and it is always 5:51, ten minutes ahead on our clocks. Then I lay in bed until the real 6:08 am. On weekends I wake up, after letting the pets out and feeding all of them and I go write or paint but on weekdays when there is work and Gabrielle to be dropped off I walk through the morning with this thing in my chest. Maybe it's money I am worrying about, worrying if I will always be at this place, always trying to play catch up. Maybe it's just a side effect of the chemo, like the hand numbing and lesions and aversion to cold. Always ten minutes ahead of myself.

Bina once told me she saw me standing in a puddle and when she too tried to stand in the puddle, she sank and nearly drowned.

After this entry I am starting to feel like I'm not much of a blogger. Maybe I should review a movie or something, talk about buying tea at a multicultural tea shop, my favorite Thai restaurant in town perhaps. I hope baby comes soon. I can see you, little one, hiding behind the curtain. I'm waiting.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

from the news...

"Gays are the only group categorically excluded from adopting in Florida," she writes. "As a brief filed by the Child Welfare League of America noted, Florida allows adoptions, for example, by those who are single, disabled, divorced, and even, in some cases, by convicted felons.

"Given the openly anti-gay origins of Florida's law, it would have been hard for the Supreme Court to find the law constitutionally valid. If any law was 'born of animosity' toward gays, it is this Florida statute."

For his part, the president's brother and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said he was pleased with the Supreme Court's stance, according to the St. Petersburg Times. "It's the law of the state," Bush remarked, "and I think it's the appropriate law."

Right-wing Christian leaders backed that gospel: "We're just pleased that children are going to get protected," said Florida Christian Coalition executive director Bill Stephens, "that courts are doing what's in the best interest of children and keeping them in heterosexual homes."

.......................

My friend Shari, when I visited her this past summer, gave me the most beautiful gift in the world for our new baby. It is my story to keep so I won't share all of it with you but years ago she helped raise a child with her then partner. This child, as a baby, would crawl up the couch, climb up Shari as if she were a tree and breathlessly rest his head on her chest. And Shari, looking down at this child, told me the first thought in her head was, "I have to make the world a better place and myself in it." I''m paraphrasing but you get the point. I will make the world and myself a better place. Mark my words.

Jerks.

Gabrielle has a crush on Daniel Radcliffe, the boy who plays Harry Potter. Of course, if I ever dared to say this out loud I would be a dead man. We have long rambling six degrees of separation conversations about him. Did you know that Gabrielle has a cousin named Harriet, which has the same first four letters of Harry? Very intriguing.....

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

I was talking with Irene last night and I was explaining to her what I am trying to accomplish by writing poetry, besides of course writing good poetry and I told her I wanted to create space between the words that people could enter. I don't want to state the obvious but at the same time I don't want to create an in-joke or world that only makes sense to me. I think that's a way of being responsible for your work. I don't want to walk them by the hand: here is a tree, here is a river, insert metaphor here. I was reading the short stories of Reinaldo Arenas and to me he writes like that, creating space between the words, trusting the reader. That trust seems so implicit.

I think that way with music too but it's harder for me. I think as a member of a very sensitive device, our audio visual group from recent...at our best moments we made the kind of art that tried to challenge people to see that. I think it's harder to create a live experience than being able to edit it, you know what I mean? I think we failed as much as we succeeded. It was, for me at least, beyond fun. It made sense.


in progress Posted by Hello


two very recent works Posted by Hello

Still no ice storm but plenty of rain. Saw Mikey and the Letter (half of it anyway) at the Bad Dog Tavern last night. I blocked out everything in my head for a little while and felt what it was like to feel normal again. Plus they did a great cover of James' Sit Down.

My friend Mike C has invited me to join in Shirts Against, possibly contributing my own t-shirt, either one for cancer or specifically for colon cancer. Either way he charmed me and when the baby comes me Irene and baby will head over t0 his and Angie's for wine and salmon.

The excitement and velocity of yesterday has died down but I am still of dreams and ideas on what to write and paint. I read Derek Kirk Kim's Same Difference online yesterday and it melted me. It sucks you in when you aren't looking and holds you. Very poetic and very funny. Also very inspiring. I've been talking to Doug of Black Bear Combo fame for all those wondering out there, he does amazing silkscreen and print posters for shows (check it out here) and I am going to keep going with the stencils. I've been using watercolors and stencils to make layers and backgrounds and just exploring. Good stuff.



first try from two years ago Posted by Hello