I went to the grand opening of the Vida Spa at the Pan Pacific Seattle on Thursday night. The spa is on the second floor of a retail space across from the Pan Pacific. Dim lighting, natural materials in the design concept, enlarged photographs of images from nature. Comparing the space to the exhale mind body spa in Dallas/New York, I was not that excited about it. The locker room and bathroom space were tiny. The lounge/waiting area was filled with overstuffed chairs that made the area feel congested. An additional waiting area between treatment areas seemed very public and also small in size. The traffic on event night was subdued compared to exhale's grand opening and open house events. There were practitioners on hand to provide short complimentary treatments, but this seemed poorly coordinated - not enough staff available, despite the fact that there were many staff circulating the building without guests, and a confusion around how to get in the queue for treatments. One staff person actively discouraged my friend and I from getting a treatment and told us to come back for the real thing. She also whisked away our dosha tea mugs before we were finished with them. The treatment rooms themselves were spacious and modern and outfitted with Ayurvedic therapeutic herbal steamers to suit your dosha.

Call for prose

The-Out-of Bounds Essay:
Bloomsbury Review's
New Bi-Monthly Imaginary Nonfictions Feature

Editors: Reamy Jansen and Daniel Nester

We're both looking for fresh, off-beat, non-fiction prose.

No more than 300 words.
Send two copies of your entry to

Reamy Jansen
16 Homestead Ave.
Highland Falls, NY 10928.

Include SASE, brief bio, e-mail address, and phone number.

Goods news comes in cycles...

This morning, I opened an email officially admitting me into the UW Museology Program, active Summer 09. I think the thesis project is going to be the postcard project that Ricky B and I have been talking about since last year.

This afternoon, I opened a letter from the 4 Culture Foundation here in Seattle - they have awarded me one of 75 artists individual grants to support my poetry manuscript in progress Adamantine.

Thanks to the universe for sending these gifts to illuminate the brightly lit path during a particularly dark week.

The Ten Pachi haircut experience took about five pounds out of my hair, and introduced me to some great organic products - the digital perm is next, once I save up some funds and grow out my locks a few more inches ...

I'm guest curating the poetry reading series at the Seattle Art Museum for September and October 2008. If you're poet with plans to come through the Pacific Northwest this fall and are interested in reading for the Museum on September 11 or October 9, drop me a line here.

This Condensery: Poets on Mentorship

curated by Jennifer Bartlett

Featuring interviews with:

Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker
Joanna Fuhrman and Susanna Fry
Shin Yu Pai and Renee Rossi
Jennifer Firestone and Eileen Myles

Essays and poems by:

Jen Benka
Susanna Fry & Joanna Fuhrman
Renée Rossi
Shin Yu Pai

And excerpts from Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts & Affections by Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg
(University of Iowa Press, 2008)

Elizabeth Treadwell
Katy Lederer
Kristin Prevallet

File Magazine has an interesting photo essay on the Sanji capsule village on the Taipei coast here. For more images, see my Taiwan blog. I know as much about the project as I did two years ago when I was in Taipei - and apparently info on the pod city is generally hard to come by.

All Asians look alike.

At the Poetry & The Museum panel on Thursday, I learned about the work of Willie Cole, a New Jersey-based artist who works with everyday objects like shoes and irons. The piece that was projected at the panel was of an "anxious object" constructed of women's shoes entitled "Sole Protector." The form and shape of the sculpture evoked angry Buddhist deities and Mahakala-like figures. The teeth of the figure were made from white high heeled shoes. The image stayed with me and I went online this morning to see if I could learn more about Cole's use of materials and his interests in Eastern religion. What I found instead was this:



Cole uses irons throughout his work, as sculptural materials, but in this print, he has used the iron as a printmaking/branding device to create a unique image which references his relationship to the tool used to produce the artwork.

the iron blossom

burnt orange flame
of iron molecules exposed
to air, traces of seared
fibers, handprints of
the maker's impression,
branding beauty

A sad day for the ICP.

The UW Museology program hosted the Transforming Museums Conference this week which brought together museologists and museum studies students from around the country. It was an inspiring conference where the themes of social justice and transformation were continually addressed and placed at the center of the dialogue. I was able to sit in on a number of papers, my favorite of which was a talk given by an exhibition designer at the U of Vermont Museum who spoke on the history of museums collaborating with individual artists to interpret and curate their collections - he talked about Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum project at the Maryland Historical Society, Andy Warhol's work, and Yinka Shonibare's reinstallation of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. I am very much enchanted with the idea of the artist intervening and interpreting a given collection and am thinking now about the idea of proposing to the Riverside Historical Museum an AIR that would allow me to research the history of the city where I grew up and to interpret the collections in a way that would arrange the objects in such a fashion as to illuminate some of the discontinuities of my own experience.

Travis Nichols, Mary Jane Knecht and I put together and spoke on a panel on Poetry and the Museum. Travis talked about the Ulrich show and MJ talked about the Frye catalog that is scheduled to come out from UW Press in March 09 - a project based on commissions of Seattle-area writers to interpret objects from the Frye's collections. It was my first time meeting Travis, though I think I probably met and hung out at Charlie's with most of the U Mass bunch at one time or another of that era after the obligatory Wordsworth reading, that he definitely seemed very familiar.

I thought in some ways of the panel as a public coming out - after a long hard year, I've decided to leave the anthropology program at UW to pursue other interests. More on that as it develops.

My husband thinks I'm funny.

We had a serious talk about transference, and the Libran propensity for falling in love with all things, and all people beautiful like clockwork every spring when the world is exploding in flowers.

K said, "Yes, BUT I have a sense of self." Which was to imply that I have no sense of self. Which I disputed with an argument that went something like this: "But I DO have a sense of self, I just get confused about where I end and the other person begins.It's all part of the same thing - i.e. love."

Kort laughed so hard that tears came out of his eyes. And the more he laughed, the more I laughed. This is why we are together.

Yesterday, my therapist suggested to me a revolutionary concept: that it is not necessary for one to suffer to realize one's dream. This might seem contrary to the whole notion of Buddhistic suffering and to my parents' entire life history in this country and in post-war Taiwan, and yet, the notion brings to me a deep and extreme relief.

CFW

Call for E-Literature, Digital Fiction, Hypertext Fiction, Sequential Text Video, Digital Poetry, E-Poetry, and other forms of Electronic Writing.

The visionary Counterpath Press announces a call for work for Counterpath Online, its digital publishing venue. There is no specific theme, but all work must utilize digital tools to create interactive, moving, responsive, generative or playful creations. Text only works or documentations of work are not being considered for this issue. All artworks will be peer-reviewed/juried and the issue will be promoted extensively.

Counterpath Press Online:
http://www.counterpathpress.org/cpathonline/issue%202/splash2.html

Please send submissions to Jason Nelson (Guest Editor) as soon as possible. Works that are submitted earlier will be given special consideration.

E-Mail: elitpath@gmail.com

The final deadlines if June 18th 2008. All work must be accompanied by the following:

Description of the work (300 wds.)
Artist bio written as a small absurd story (300 wds.)
Screen Shot (approx. 300x300, saved as jpeg)

Those authors/artists chosen will be asked to participate in a brief interview regarding their creations. In addition, authors/artists will be asked to write brief reviews (200 words) of another chosen authors/artists work.

Om Tare Tuttare Ture Soha

Today is a good day for divine intervention. Paging Green Tara...

I had the most stressful day in my life today chasing around foam-core poster boards and table-top easels blowing around in a windstorm on Red Square every two minutes. Kort's been down with the flu, my 20-page anthro paper needs major rewrites that I can not even bring myself to look at, I am experiencing transference issues, and I am delivering a conference paper on Thursday. And I have spring fever and all of its accompaniments.

Om Tare Tuttare Ture Soha!

Other research dissertation ideas:

The Losheng Sanatorium
Love Boat Tours which date back to 1967

WT on Tuesday

Every once in awhile I think about moving back to Dallas. The reasons are complex - we have a good community there of healers and arts professionals, the weather is warm and closer to what I grew up with, the cost of property and the cost of living are actually affordable, and then Kort sends me this, which makes that fuzzy dream very quickly evaporate!

Robert Rauschenberg is dead at 82.

What should I devote my research too?

The pressure's on to pick a dissertation topic by Winter quarter (Jan 09), for which I will then begin to write grant application drafts. I'm writing right now the second of two papers on poetry and am open to exploring new topics, but realize that whatever it's going to be, it's going to have to deeply resonate and reflect something back to me about my own experiences, if I am to stay engaged. Here are things that interest me:

- hikikomori
- Taiwanese grave-paper makers and funerary practices
- secondhand clothing as it circulates to developing countries
- garbage
- the New Factographers
- poetry tourism (i.e. Basho's Oku No Hosomichi)
- Guatemalan indigenous healing practices
- Tibetan medical healing practices
- Ayurvedic medical healing practices
- PostSecret, Found, and the Museum of Broken Relationships