pockets

why don't they put pockets in women's clothes? personally, i think it's to keep us chained to carrying purses. san francisco has been unusually warm lately (global warming no doubt) and i've pretty much been living out of a backpack (couch surfing and storage spaces are a san francisco tradition, seems like--this is my second time around) and i didn't have any summer clothes with me.
seriously, if you don't know san francisco weather, you pretty much can need a winter coat at any moment. and if you don't need one where you are, well, just cross the street and you might. you think i'm joking...i'm not.
anyway, back to pockets.
so, it was warm. i went to the thrift store and bought a couple of skirts, then it got cold. duh. but then it got warm again and i put on one of my new skirts, grabbed my key, phone, cash...you know, the stuff you really need...and discovered i had no pockets.
i didn't think about pockets when i bought the skirts. none of them have pockets. no pockets! where the hell are you going to put your stuff if you don't have pockets? oh yeah, you have to carry a bag.
i hate carrying bags. for one thing, you're chained to it. you can't get up and dance without it swinging awkwardly on your shoulder, or leaving it at the table and worrying about it getting stolen. even if you're not a worrier, you RISK getting it stolen. blech.
for another thing, no matter what size bag you carry, you will fill it to capacity and beyond. i'm going to call this sara's axiom. then you see all these women walking around with mega-bags, overflowing with stuff, and one hunched up shoulder that's probably aching. again, blech.
then too, of course, the bag manufacturers want you to buy a bag to go with each outfit, each pair of shoes...it's all a plot to make you spend more money. (in the u.s.? would they do that?)
men's clothes have pockets. always. yet you see men carrying bags too. why? why, if you don't have to? i don't get it...
i mean, okay, if you're carrying your computer to work at a sunny cafe instead of holed up inside your house, fine. but for every time you want to leave the house and take your damn key and phone? really? fuck that. give me pockets.

russian lit--anna karenina

suddenly having a whole slew of russians in my life i've been a little obsessed with things russian lately. russian films, russian music, russian language...
so lately, i've been reading and rereading a lot of russian literature. to wit:

i reread Anna Karenina--last time was when i was about 13 i guess,  a previous russian lit phase. i was living in tehran, iran at the time and devoured Anna Karenina (tragic love stories and 13 year old girls are a natural mix), Brothers Karamazov (i must revisit that one, i don't think i understood most of it), Dr. Zhivago (who wouldn't want to read it after seeing the movie, recent at the time, and falling in 13 year old love with omar sharif, who incidentally, i met a couple of years ago--but that's another story) and of course War and Peace (nothing like a good epic novel to hold me entranced).

does We the Living by ayn rand count? i think so. it was a fictionalized account of rand's life in russia just after the 1917 revolution.

Anna Karenina is a rich novel of love and betrayal with so many layers i didn't get the first time around. as a mother now myself, anna's heartrending choices regarding her own happiness and continued contact with her son evoked thoughts and emotions that were non-existent for me at 13. her relationships with her husband and lover were complex and torn, her melancholy so deep.

when i fell under a train once (packing my baby sister off to school in toronto--again, another story) i imagined for an instant that i was anna. but the train i fell under was just starting to move and i scrambled out, unhurt. i wasn't anna.

if you've read it before, if you've never read it, if you've been a lover or a mother, been a mistress or had one, if you just like beautiful lyrical tales of life, i highly recommend Anna Karenina.

the weird and wonderful world of writing for the world wide web...

when kaleidoscope closed i lost my home and my job in one heavy blow. damn! 

the past year has been difficult, but it's getting better as i've entered the weird and wonderful world of writing for the world wide web. writing content that is...you know, all that stuff that you read on every site when you go surfing the net.

it started slowly...my first project was an ebook for a site called hyperink. after being accepted as a writer, you go on a spreadsheet page and select three topics you feel confident to write about. one of my choices was iran, i remember, one is lost in oblivion in the nether reaches of my brain, and the one they assigned me was called "The Top Ten Rolling Stones Songs: Lyrics and Analysis." well, if you know me at all, you know i'm a huge stones fan, so this one seemed a no-brainer. but what are the top ten stones songs? by what criteria? i spent hella time researching the best-selling songs, reader's polls, etc. to come up with a list that could arguably be called the stones top ten. i wrote my ebook, got a few formatting revisions, and just like that, i was the author of an ebook. just today i got 64 cents in royalties deposited to my paypal account. watch out world! i'm gonna be rich! 

it took me about 3 whole days to write my ebook for a whopping $90. i think i averaged about $3-4 an hour. when i tried to write another book for hyperink, they told me they were no longer publishing books written to order for them, but instead publishing people's blogs.....hhmmmm....hint, hint???

then i got a gig writing book reviews. now, i've written lots of book reviews for some pretty amazing books, but this was different. the books i was reviewing were ebook summaries of best-selling self-help, diet, and inspirational books. yikes. kinda like reviewing cliff notes. whatever, it paid decently--$25 for a short, 150 word review for amazon and two shorter (just a couple of lines) but different reviews for itunes and barnes and noble. 

i was pretty horrified when i was told to review a certain book and it turned out to be by a televangelist. ouch! i didn't know what to do so i did the only thing i could, i shut my eyes and spewed garbage. the deal was, it had to be a five star review. i could have written a scathing one pretty easily, but praise? nevertheless, they loved the review and sent me a new title with the caveat that if it offended me i didn't have to do it. ha! nothing could have offended me more than the televangelist. i had to laugh though, turns out the new book was a how-to bdsm guide. that one was actually pretty fun. then the titles dried up and i was back to square one.

soon i came on an online agency called odesk that lists hundreds of online jobs. i registered, filled in my profile, took some of their tests so people could see how great i was, uploaded a few things into a portfolio (my rolling stones ebook!), set my hourly rate ($10) and applied for some jobs. nada. i was pretty gratified, though, when a couple of people approached me for work. the first one was writing short articles for $7.50 each. not much money, but i was desperate. the trial test article they had me write was "do's and don'ts for your trip to new york". ok. write it (in their template) off the top of my head, stick in a couple of links culled from 5 minutes of research, and i was finished. 

they loved it. hired me right away. gave me great feedback. then promptly sent me six articles to write on emails. is there really that much to say about emails? like, one of the topics was cc in emails. then the next one was cc and bcc in emails. seriously? but i persevered and was relieved when they were finished with only a few formatting revisions. ready for the next batch, i envisioned writing about new york again, or really, anything but emails. guess what? the next six were on (drum roll) EMAILS!!!

aaaahhhhh......only this time i had to write on stuff like POP and SMTP and PHP in emails. how the fuck do i know? and with only a couple of key words and a template to guide me, i jumped in. i researched, i read, i concentrated and tried hard to understand, and i wrote what i thought were comprehendible short articles on the basics of POP, SMTP, and PHP in emails. turns out, that wasn't what they wanted at all. i ignored the articles for a while. they sat in my revisions folder while i worked on other articles. they instituted a new system where you could choose from a list and i chose a bunch of political stuff (go figure). then the editor they assigned to me started getting bitchy. i quit. i never got paid for those email articles because i never did the revisions but at that point i would only have been making about $1.50-2.00 an hour. they had reached a point of such diminishing returns that i don't give a fuck i didn't get paid.

now, however, i have traded in the $7.50 articles for $25 articles. they're shorter, they have clear instructions, they have topics that are in my field, and i even get a byline! so we'll see. i submitted my first one a week ago and have yet to hear from an editor. i went ahead and wrote and submitted the two more i could choose before an editor worked with me and now i wait. can't choose more. can't contact an editor. i wait. as i said, we'll see.

but there have been some other jobs along the way. i write about insurance for a really nice guy in australia. i write lead paragraphs for a study abroad site, i've been working with a really cool guy from suriname who's taking stanley jordan there for a concert this july in hopes of starting a new jazz festival in suriname. one of the pieces i did for him is apparently going to be in the surinamese airlines' planes. 

see? weird and wonderful...

dilemma

here's the thing. i don't want kaleidoscope to be a 501(c)3. if you don't know, that's a tax-exemption status that pretty much any organization has to have if it wants to get any grants. most organizations, certainly most arts organizations, cannot exist without grants.
kaleidoscope could sure use some grants. in fact, i found one on monday that kaleidoscope seemed to be eligible for--as long as it was a non-profit 501(3). the grant application was due on thursday. it had to either be postmarked by a u.s. post office or dropped off at the grant-giver's office by closing hours. i made the decision to take the plunge into non-profit status and apply for the grant.
working furiously with a good friend at my side (thanks) and other outside support, i got estimates, crunched numbers, created a budget, wrote a mission statement, a vision statement, a history, a (perfectly) 75 word description of the project to be funded as a well as a (much longer) detailed description. i put together a good board and answered a ridiculous number of questions--over and over. the good friend by my side put together photographs and videos, printed out pages and pages of application and calendar (two years worth of calendar!)
i missed the deadline. not by much. a few hours, probably when all is said and done, because though we had answered all the questions and assembled all the documentation a mere half-hour after the last post office closed (what major city doesn't have a post office open till midnight?), we had not made the requisite 10 copies! i don't think we'd made the digital copy either.
so yeah, i missed the deadline by a couple of hours.
telling myself that the work wouldn't be in vain i decided to do some work on getting the rest of my non-profit ducks in a row for next time. i got on the computer that i'm writing this on right now. just a few minutes ago (right before i started writing this blog) i googled "501(c)3" to check out exactly what the rules said--especially about politics. while checking out the rules, this is what i found:

Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity.  Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.

i found it on the irs site
http://www.irs.gov/charities/charitable/article/0,,id=163395,00.html

and that brings me back to why i really don't want to be a 501(c)3.
i've been telling anybody who asked why kaleidoscope wasn't a non-profit that i didn't like restrictions, that i didn't want to do the paperwork, that people generally didn't give enough to take it off their taxes anyway. but grants give enough money to want to take it off taxes and if i really didn't want to do the paperwork i wouldn't have sat here for two and a half days doing the paperwork.
i really don't like restrictions though.
and this particular restriction really pisses me off.
kaleidoscope is already a de facto non-profit. not just because it is it not earning any profit but because it functions as a non-profit. it is a non-discriminatory service to the general community providing access to a panoply of the arts and educational resources; it is a service to the artistic community providing opportunities not always available through business for profit.
of course i can personally endorse any candidate i choose. but kaleidoscope would not be serving its community responsibly if it could not speak out about a candidate that was a proponent of non-discrimination, or the arts, or education or any of the issues important to kaleidoscope's community.
there's a poster on kaleidoscope's memory wall right now of ralph nader and matt gonzalez from the 2008 presidential campaign. there's a beautiful poster in support of the revolutions of the peoples of egypt, lybia and tunisia. i'm not going to take them down.
i may do the whole non-profit thing anyway, though. kaleidoscope sure could use some funding. but i promise i won't take the posters down.
update: kaleidoscope free speech zone is now a non-profit

red onions

i remember the red onions at my grandmother’s house. she loved red onions, but i don’t mean the vegetables although she did eat them like fruit. lasca--named after a deeply romantic, deeply tragic poem that takes place “in texas, down by the rio grande”--lasca would peel the skin and take a huge bite of the purple red onion just as though it were an apple. and like an apple the clear nectar of the fruit would run down her chin.

but i digress.

those crisp red balls that bit back on the tongue aren’t the red onions i’m talking about.

everybody in my family tends to play with words: lasca became grasca as per a great-grandson, we all adopted my sister’s “who-genken” (he chicken?) for rooster, and reunions will always be red onions to me. 

old fashioned family red onions with aunts and cousins and cousins who were called aunt that i didn’t know from adam (as they would say, frequently quoting and misquoting the bible). they knew me though and it was all very confusing for a young girl who only showed up in the tiny town every couple of years.

the red onions had as many kids running around as it did adults. i’m not sure what my sisters did but i ran wild with the others. mostly with my cousin patti. one red onion we had just arrived in town and i called patti (second cousin--grandfather’s side) at her mother’s house only three doors down (wasn’t that the name of a band in the late 90s maybe?) anyway, we made plans to race to the midway point, the driveway at vangie’s house. vangie was patti’s grandmother and my grandfather’s sister. she was a little off because as a young girl she had given herself an abortion with a knitting needle--some things have changed for the better.

but i digress again.

i was newly arrived in town after a long absence, and long is forever when you’re young, the red onion was on, and i was going to meet my friend, my cousin, patti. a race. for me passing hairy carey’s house (she was crazy mean and scared us kids, but not like jasper scared us. jasper was truly scary. a witch. probably anorexic although that was not a word people knew in those days. hairy carey would just grab us and yell at us to work. snap peas or string beans).

but i keep going off on tangents. i have a little trouble with linear narrative.

so. i was to race past hairy carey’s house to vangie’s driveway from my grandmother’s patch of lawn with the big spreading tree and the rope swing and patti was to leave her driveway and race past her grandmother vangie’s house to her driveway. i got there first. i’m six months older and though later patti grew much taller and faster than i, at that age (maybe 7?) 6 months still gave me an edge. 

but as i reached the finish line--the middle of the driveway--i fell, the sharp rocks of the gravel driveway gashing my knee open. patti arrived a millisecond later and walked me back to lasca’s house. There the assembled adults who peered at my knee with the accumulated wisdom of the ages decided that a butterfly bandage would be much more appropriate than stitches. nobody wanted to leave the red onion and drive 20 miles to the nearest hospital; the hospital where i was born. to this day i have a thick scar on my right knee--smooth, shiny and pink, shaped vaguely like a butterfly wing.

but i loved the red onions where we kids would trash the adults for pinching our cheeks and remarking how we had grown. we would declare brashly that next time we were going to pinch their cheeks and tell them how much they’d aged. the red onions where we lurked in the backyard eating huge purple grapes off the vine, keeping a sharp eye out for jasper who only came to the back door. the red onions where we spoke in low tones, telling our tall jane and butch family stories (tall jane lived in lasca’s north closet, a big dark attic, and butch was the faithful henchman who drove her horse-drawn black carriage to git the bad children.) the red onions where we whispered of sightings of the family pooka hound and who might die next.

so those are the red onions i’m talking about. 

this summer has been a summer of red onions--not with the scraps of my small-town family that still know me even when i don’t know them--but with others, new and old, who have become members of my extended family along the way.

it started with linda. linda and i were classmates (in a class of 13) in a girls boarding school my senior year of high school. i went to 4 high schools in 4 years. traveling all my life in an age before “chat”, before email, when even telephoning was difficult and expensive. my life has left me somewhat isolated from my past. in an earlier post i wrote about remembering margaret, one of the handful of people who knew me as a child. 

linda didn’t know me as a child but she did know me as a teenager, caught between childhood and adulthood.

one late night when i couldn’t sleep i was playing around on the computer, doing facebook searches for names i remembered. i found a page for margaret hall, the girls boarding school where i knew linda. i “liked” the page, but didn’t know anybody there. a few weeks ago though, the margaret hall page had a brief viral moment as most of my class discovered each other and began sharing pictures and memories. the online red onion was under way. then linda’s sister posted that though linda didn’t have facebook she was in town, san francisco, the town i live in. we hooked up, met for fancy cocktails at a tourist restaurant with sidewalk seating on the waterfront, and talked and talked and talked some more. we giggled like the schoolgirls we had been together. we didn’t have long that first day, but we reconnected anyway. then linda came to my open mic at kaleidoscope. she read sonnets in french and english and i remembered how we got drunk and spoke french together (the best french i’ve ever spoken) at the convent just north of new york city on our senior trip. then i quoted puck’s closing speech from a midsummer night’s dream that we had performed our senior year, she as titania, i as puck of course. “if we shadows have offended, think, but this, and all is mended...”

linda’s niece and her boyfriend came too and linda had two red onions going at once. the open mic eventually turned into a salon with poets and human rights lawyers and journalists mulling over the state of the world. finally, it was just linda and bobby and me, talking all night. it was the first of a series of red onions this summer.

the next red onion story involves the australians. if you’re reading this check out the original story about them. and i’ll update another day. that red onion is a whole other story.

the australians

first there were three. kate, cody and jamie bounded up to me on the sidewalk and asked "is this kaleidoscope? can we listen to the poetry?" the kaleidoscope reading series had just ended and everybody was clearing out.  i informed them regretfully that the show was just over and asked if they were from australia. it seemed fairly obvious but they could have been local now. if they weren't i wanted to find out where they'd heard about poetry at my little arts space here in the mission district, san francisco.
they confirmed they were from sydney and added that somebody named sean had steered them my way. thanks sean.
there was something about these three australians i liked. they seemed merry, eager, intelligent, friendly...
i asked them inside and told them if they wanted to hang out while i closed down i'd take them to the rev, my local hangout. they did and i did and we walked down to the cafe where i introduced them to a swirl of names and faces. we hung on the patio a little while drinking beers and smoking then made our way down to the elbo room for afrolicious. my friend diamond had invited us to come hear him drum. drinks and dancing later we parted for the evening. it was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
we spent a fair amount of time together for the next ten days or so. kate and jamie photographed and filmed while cody wooed the audience with a sea shanty on diamond dave's show on pirate cat radio (please don't confuse diamond with diamond dave. they are friends though), and at kaleidoscope. i really liked the shoeshine boy song too.
laura and alia, numbers four and five, arrived in just in time to catch umka & bronevik rock the house in an intimate set at porto franco who produced their first u.s. vinyl. australia meets russian in san francisco. they arrived in time for the kaleidoscope shows, too. the five and i sat up late in the closed gallery and shared ideas, wine and laughter. we told stories. when they bought frank from frank i knew they really were leaving soon. frank was a luxurious ride for their u.s. walkabout and even came with fancy rims, bullet holes and a sub-woofer to make any oakland gangsta proud. they ditched the sub-woofer.
we planned a slumber party for their last night. we were gonna watch movies but it didn't work out that way. it had been open mic and people had stayed. they took off the next day for the giant redwoods (that i, regretfully, have yet to see).
then, a few days ago number six showed up. jesse. i saw someone peering at the kaleidoscope sign on the doorbell from halfway down the block. i asked if i could help him. he countered by asking if i was sara. when i admitted to it he confessed to being number six and my australian family extended. jesse and i shared dinner at a diner, jazz at kaleidoscope, the rev--of course--and buxter hoot'n at blue six. (the five saw buxter hoot'n at my place with quinn devaux). it was cool that all six australians got to see buxter hoot'n, even if it wasn't at the same time. and i sent jesse with jessica to specs. jessica had hung out with the five too and is apparently very reminiscent of another jessica who is friends of the five, nay, six, in sydney.
i hear number seven may show up sometime.
if you want to know more about the continuing adventures of the australians they're making it easy to keep up. presshatch.com is their online travel zine. i wrote a short piece for it.
global nomads. global community.

Fifth Annual Poems Under the Dome is this Friday, April 30th

Fifth Annual Poems Under the Dome is this Friday, April 30th

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