gypsywoman

i see you here

i see you there

i see you everywhere

but who are you gypsywoman

with sweet words and a pretty smile

your spirit tempts taunts

but do i dare

would you could you be

the gentle breeze here today

and gone tomorrow

softly fluttering

sooth my aching heart

ease my hidden sorrow

* * * * *

a gentle breeze i am not

i am the storm of storms a gale force wind

the tempest fierce

the raging tsunami taking with it all defenses

sweeping away washing away

the debris of yesterday

this life transcend

so do you want to know

to really know the who and what of me

or would you rather just imagine me

on the playground of what if

where your heart of stone

is safe and sound

from the likes of

me

this

wild

banshee

by the artist Claudio Parentela

lip service

these lips

are red lips

ruby red lips

these lips are powerful lips

lips that can change history

my history even your history

make you change your ways

into their ways

they can cause things to happen

you never dreamed of

never heard of

these lips

can lamblast you

right outta your

little comfort zone

and throw you

for a loop like

you’ve never been

looped before

they’ll pucker and pout

turn you inside out

these lips are talkin’ lips

they speak of truth of beauty

of life of love

they speak of me

of you

of us

of possibility

probability

and the physics of both

they speak of passion

of poetry

of poetic passion

of passionate poetry

they speak to you

these lips are loud lips

rambunctious lips

rowdy lips

irreverent lips

they ramble

they recite

they speak up

and act out

they are unruly lips

lips that have no rules

and will break your rules

these lips are happy lips

lips that smile

that open wide

and laugh out loud

lips that love to laugh

at big things

small things

at you

and with you

and at themselves

they laugh

these lips are magical lips

they can charm you disarm you

make you mold you molest you

melt you motivate you

they can turn you into things

you’ve never been before

and make you forget

what it was you were

these lips can take you

on a magic carpet ride

and have you beg

for a one-way ticket

these lips are lovin’ lips

luscious and plump

full and ripe

ripe for lovin’ for bein’ loved

for living’ for livin’ more

these luscious lips

will make you

wanna taste ‘em

touch ‘em

tease ‘em

be teased by ‘em

make you

wanna kiss on ‘em

till you can’t kiss no more

then they’ll have you

comin’ back knockin’ on their door

yeah, these lips are lovin’ lips

these gypsy lips

of mine

by the artist Claudio Parentela

by the artist Claudio Parentela

Rosalia de Castro

Today is Galician Literature Day in Galicia, Spain. In 1863 Rosalia de Castro published her Cantares Gallegos, the first book in Galician Language.

Misia Godebska by Vallotton

Museum D’Orsay in Paris: about Misia, Muse of the Belle Epoque

Exhibition: 12 June – 9 September 2012

Misia Godebska (1872-1950) was a legendary figure of the French art scene from the Belle Epoque to the Roaring Twenties. At first she became known for her talent as a pianist. Her marriage in 1893 to Thadée Natanson, the editor of the journal La Revue blanche, propelled her to the centre of a group of creative artists who were champions of Symbolism and the decorative arts.

At the height of her influence, she became one of the most sought-after portrait models of her time, sitting for Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir. She was a friend of Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Cocteau and Chanel, and financed the Ballets Russes for over ten years.

This multidisciplinary exhibition brings together portraits of Misia and her entourage, works, documents and accounts by contemporary artists that illustrate the prolific creative activity at the time Misia was the Queen of Paris.

Curators

Isabelle Cahn, curator, Musée d’Orsay

Marie Robert, curator, Musée d’Orsay

http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/home.html

South Cove by Mary Miss

In the 60, artists started to look for new ways of expression. They were tired of the marketing of paintings and sculptures. In the deserts of the United States were made the first works: Nevada, New Mexico, Utah or Arizona, but some of them only exist today as video recordings or photographic documents, since the erosion has destroyed them due to their ephemeral intention.

The Land artist looks for a dialogue with Nature. He/she rediscovers the countryside and introduces some new element. Sometimes, it’s a little change, some others it’s a big change, using excavators and transporting great amount of materials.

Usually, the artists connected with Land art have been involved with minimal art and conceptual art. The design for Contoured Playground in New York by Isamu Noguchi (1941) has been interpreted as an important early piece, the same as some works by Brancusi. But the movement began in 1968 in New York, with the group exhibition ‘Earth Works’ at the Dwan Gallery. The artists included were Jan Dibbets, Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, Neil Jenney, Richard Long, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Gunther Uecker, Walter de Maria, and David Medalla. Perhaps the most famous is Robert Smithson, creator of ‘Spiral Jetty’ and author of the essay ‘The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’, which provided a theoretical framework for the movement. My favorite is Christo and his wrapping monuments.

‘Environmental conversation’ could be a motto for their intentions. A conversation that will continue forever recovering our natural roots, our primitive feelings, more environmentally friendly than those of our post-industrial society, tired and isolated.

Reichstag wrapping, by Christo

Some important later works:

-Double Negative by Michael Heizer (1970)

-Cadillac Ranch by The Ant Farm (1974)

-Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt (1976)

-The Stone Field Sculpture by Carl Andre (1977)

-Lightning Field by Walter de Maria (1977)

-Comb of the Winds by Eduardo Chillida (1977)

-Effigy Tumuli by Michael Heizer (1985)

-South Cove by Mary Miss (1988)

-Reichstag wrapping by Christo (1995)

Carlos Fuentes

Today, 16 of May of 2012, Carlos Fuentes died at 83. Fuentes was known as the fiction author of The Death of Artemio Cruz and The Old Gringo. He was one of the best representatives writers of the Latin-American Boom.

by Duane Hanson

Yareah magazine next issue is being titled “The Sixties”, an exciting time full of changes, of economic developments, political achievements and failures. Great people (Kennedy, Martin L. King, Malcolm X…), great tensions (Bay of Pigs invasion, Vietnam War, Portuguese’s Colonial conflicts…), great new dimensions (Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon, first heart transplantation by Barnard…).

For Arts was a great period, full of changes and peculiar artists (Warhol, Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Smithson…) searching new ways of expression (Pop, Action Painting, Op or Land art, Hyperrealism…).

The sixties were the age of youth. Children from the post 2^nd World War baby boom became young adults and following the achievements of the Generation Beat eventually resulted in revolutionary ways of thinking and writing. Many of the revolutionary ideas which began in the sixties are continuing to develop today.

In America Sylvia Plath or Mary McCarthy wrote about women in roles outside those of the happy wives and mothers. Marshall McLuhan popularized the idea of the ‘global village’ and Harper Lee the ‘races gap’.

In Europe, the old policy exploded (May 68) while Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir marked the new tendencies.

In 1963, John le Carre had published ‘The Spy who Came in from the Cold’ and in 1967, Gabriel Garcia Marquez will publish ‘One hundred years of Solitude’. New ways, great genres, which will continue all of the century, still now.

Psychedelia, freedom, sexual new habits, appreciation of African culture, of Indian mysticism, of gay rights.

by Roy Lichtenstein

Some people mistook their personal journeys, they fell into drugs, into radicalism. Some countries complicated their future, but some others started their democracies and, above all, everybody spoke of human rights.

An interesting time, of flowers and happy hippies spitting on the atomic bomb.

Yareah magazine would like to hear your opinion: you can send your experience, your parent’s experience, your article or short story. A poem about those psychedelic years or a picture to celebrate this next number: issue 25.

The feedback starts now.

Join us!

http://yareah.com/?page_id=120

Carry Each His Burden, by James Goertel

CARRY EACH HIS BURDEN is the debut fiction collection by James Goertel. Drawing from his background as an academic, media freelancer, and screenwriter, Goertel’s writing is at once cinematic, richly crafted, and fiercely original. The five stories within are thematically tied to the collection’s title: Carry Each His Burden. In the title story, the son of a literary giant has carried a family secret for forty years and is now ready to confront it and his father once and for all. In ‘Animal Kingdom’, a pedophile stalks his prey unaware he too is being stalked. ‘Memories Can’t Wait’ delivers a powerful meditation on remembrance, loss and love through one man’s struggle to live with his own heart-wrenching memories before time itself runs out. In ‘Letting the Days Go By’, a man tries to outrun his past, a broken marriage, and the trail of forgotten days rolling out behind him as he takes to the road – one that leads him, ironically, not to a new life, but to a confrontation with the past that still haunts him. And finally, ‘Almost Blue’ invites the reader to eavesdrop on multiple first person accounts of a man who turned the art world on its ear before disappearing into himself just as his most famous painting disappeared, leaving behind a fog of clues, a cloud of suspicion, and a storm of controversy over it and its connection to the death of a brilliant, but troubled musician.

James Goertel

You can see also:

Interview with James Goertel In Yareah Magazine

James Goertel site

James Goertel on Facebook

Volaverunt, by Francisco de Goya

In a convertible black Mercedes, roughly one hour before sunset, along the road from Constanţa to Mamaia, having had caroused through Ovid Square and sampled mămăligă, my wife and I looked up at the horizon on the coast and saw three harpies flying towards us at the speed of sound. Boom! I cranked the wheel. Fuck, I thought. The bitches of Electra! Swerving off the highway, we rolled down a road that ran parallel with a boggy ravine, then ended up in an grassy field. I then turned to my wife and said: “This is what we get for not understanding history! Romanians! Fascists, communists! Everything is backwards. Who cares how gypsies beg? Remind me to never take a trip with you again!”

Ironically enough, I had studied harpies as a student. I recalled how Phineas, king of Thrace, son of Poseidon—blinded, punished by the gods, because he mistreated his own children and revealed too much of the gods’ plans to humankind—left Iris, a goddess, no choice but to send the harpies down to snatch free food out of his hands (every time he tried to feed himself), on the coast of the Black Sea.

Their chattering teeth were like sharpened shards of iron. Their feathered bellies had been tended to by their own spit. I thought of Kentucky Fried Chicken as the plump three of them each perched on the hood of our Mercedes, glaring at us, hissing, through the windshield.

“So,” said my wife, who slid a loosely-knotted scarf off her neck, then turned to me in sunglasses. “Do you have a clue? No, you have quite a bit of nothing.”

I hit the dashboard several times like some angry American. “Get the fuck away! We’re Dutch! We’re cartoonists!” Such shrieking I have never heard before. I turned to my wife: “Maybe those cabbage rolls had chemicals in them and this is a hallucination.”

“They’re foaming at the mouth like drunken whores!”

“They’re not whores,” I said. “They’re harpies! Oh, why did we come?!”

“Because you wanted to see the Black Sea and needed inspiration.”

“And how much work did you complete last month? None.”

“Make me feel ashamed?” My wife laughed. “Oh, you and your little whore, believe me, I know it’s part of some conspiracy to lead me to an early grave. Stop flustering my mind!”

I glared at my wife. “I fucked up—yes, this I want to tell you—but she—.”

“I loved you more than life itself—I. . . .”

The sleep of reason, by Francisco de Goya

“I need a legacy! Don’t you know I’m fifty and I’m sonless?”

“This all comes back to me,” said my wife. “You and your sons.”

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said.

I looked at my wife, who had her eyes forward, staring at the harpies.

I did not know if my wife, behind those sunglasses, was a fallen woman. I married her because she was talented, married her because she understood my sexual proclivities and because she, too, was a cartoonist. Never did I think would it come to this—to this moment in our relationship. I looked at the harpies through the windshield, studied their faces. The one on the left corner of the hood was plump with the face of a chubby teenager. The harpy perched on the hood ornament—the Mercedes sign directly before us—had the face of a girl infant, eyes-closed, pink-faced, with scanty patches of hair on her head, yet had the body of an oily fowl. So disturbed was I by that harpy with an infant-head, that I looked at the third harpy, who had the face of a crone with moss and bits of human flesh betwixt her iron teeth.

I had a dream just like this, I thought; I was prepared for our dismemberment.

My wife shook her head, opened up and reached into the glove box for her blue package of Gauloises, then extracted a short cigarette. She lit it with a lighter that had a dolphin on it. Annoyed, she began to smoke with her right elbow cradled in her cupped left palm.

She, too, was vicious, yet she was beautiful.

I remembered how I met her in the outskirts of Amsterdam.

I had rented a bicycle and took a ride down a trail and saw a busty girl in a tight pink shorts leaning down to pump her back bicycle tire. I stopped to look at her, and she peered up at me quickly, frustrated with the pump, threw her hands up, then looked at me directly.

“Excuse me, sir, can you please help? I can’t seem to do this right.”

I smiled and crossed the road, looked down at her bicycle and then up at her and saw she was doing everything right. Amused, we then talked. I asked her what she did for a living: she said that she was an artist; I asked her “What kind?” She said she drew political cartoons which poked fun at famous people, that although she enjoyed writing the captions more than drawing, she did not think she was a natural comedian.

We talked for a while, standing there on the outskirts of Amsterdam, watching the cars scroll by us as the sun was setting. Holding a purple cap, I asked her to meet me at a café the following week, so I could show her my portfolio and so she could show me hers.

I was a decent cartoonist, she said, thumbing through the prints, at the table.

“Yes, in fact, I like the purple feathers here and here….and with this tinge of aqua.”

I had just graduated from Oxford, returned to Amsterdam, unsure of what do with my life, which was difficult because I once had my head buried in books, as a Classics major, and I dabbled in Greek and knew Latin. For a year, I read nothing but Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the original. I had also read about Jason and the Argonauts and I was taken back by the sheer wonder of what it meant for him to acquire that Golden Fleece.

I sketched them in my textbook—all those creatures, sins. I once considered myself a Protestant, I explained to my future wife.

She seemed to like my pluck and smile. I liked her lips, her gravitas.

Witches, by Francisco de Goya

Even late into the night, after many joints and cups of coffee—I somehow knew I would marry this girl. I would take a liking to simpler things: like cartoon doodling, which I had done ever since I was a child. Never did I think my number would come. That as a ghost, I would hover above my convertible, black Mercedes, my beautiful, busty wife and I melting into each another, converging into a great, gelatinous blanket, high above the scene, in the sky, above the convertible top, while harpies, with angers freshly lit, mauled through our entrails, after they each delivered two blows of death.

I looked down at the scene, thinking about the sons I never had, about my two mistresses in Romania who never knew of, nor met my wife, how rarely I colored inside the lines in my last few years of work—while the harpies snatched up our flesh with their beaks and talons, yanked out our veins, roosted through us, gnawed on our lacerated husks, hopping about in the front seat of a Mercedes, parked in a grassy field, that had no living passenger.

More Paul Rogov’s stories: http://paulrogov.wordpress.com/

30 Days with Bobby Fox: The Downhill Trio

We returned to our room. Adriana and Melody immediately flopped themselves onto the bed, buzzing from a cocktail of Absinthe and my bad-assedness.

“As sucky as that was,” Melody began. “I have to admit that it felt good to get attention and feel wanted again.

I almost forgot what it felt like. But most importantly, Jimmy, I owe you a huge thank you. I was so stupid to go out there with him alone.”

Adriana pulled out a bottle of wine and poured us all a cup. We silently took a sip, well beyond the need for a toast. She then pulled out a box of fancy truffles.

“Truffles anyone?”

Melody and I each grabbed one enthusiastically, but just as were about to place them in our mouth, Adriana yelled “Stop!”

“What the hell?,” Melody asked.

“If you’re going to eat my truffles, you have to eat them the right way. These are special.”

“What’s the right way?,” I naively asked.

“You have to savor them. These aren’t Hershey’s Kisses. This is expensive shit. And you have to respect it. You have to let it melt in your mouth. You don’t bite it. You don’t suck it. You let it melt.”

Adriana demonstrated. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to be seductive in a dominatrix sort of way, but it sure looked it.

“Understand,” she asked.

“You got to be kidding me,“ Melody said.

“No. I’m not. It’s a French thing,” Adriana said.

“But you’re not French,” Melody reminded her.

“No. But I teach it. Just like I just taught you guys.”

Melody and I proceeded to eat our truffle in the manner in which we were taught. I slowly put my tongue up to it, mocking Adriana. Melody laughed.

“It’s not funny,” Adriana said.

“I’m respecting the truffle!,” I protested.

“It’s not a clit,” she said.

“You would know,” Melody retorted as the three of us continued to savor our truffle, not so much out of respect for the fine delicacy in our mouths, but out of fear of what Adriana would do to us if we ate it like a normal person.

“I’ve had dreams like this,” I added.

“About eating truffles?,” Melody asked.

“Nothing. Nevermind,” I said, quickly covering up my tracks.

“No. Elaborate,” Adriana demanded.

“I was only kidding.”

“About what?,” Adriana asked.

“He means a threesome,” Melody said, getting straight to the point, despite my denial.

“What? Are you serious?”

“No?,” Melody said, seemingly disappointed.

“That’s not what I meant at all,” I said, realizing it was no use.

“Have you ever had one before?,” Melody asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Neither have I,” Melody said, turning toward Adriana. “What about you?”

“No comment,” Adriana replied.

“You did?”

“I don’t know. I think so. In college once.”

“How would you forget a thing like that?,” I asked.

“I did a lot of crazy shit.”

“Little Miss Prim and Proper?,” Melody teased.
“I said did.”

“How about another one?,” Melody asked.

“Sure, why not,” Adriana replied matter-of-factly as though she was just asked if she wanted another truffle.

Meanwhile, I sat in stunned silence. This had to be a dream. How could it not be?

They both turned to me.

“This is a joke, right?”

“I’m in if you’re in,” Melody said to me.

“I am pretty horny,” Adriana said.

“Where do we begin?,” I asked.

I won’t give you the details about what transpired, other than to indicate that it did indeed happen. We also finished the bottle of wine. And the truffles. And we didn’t necessarily eat them the “right way,” either. And I did not have to sleep on the pullout couch that night. I will leave the rest of the details to the imagination. Some things are better off that way.