OCCUPY CONGRESS -VOTE 2012

Katy Hilton's thoughtful opposition to SOPA US Representative KAREN BASS "canned response"

2012-01-20T15:19:00.000-08:00

an email from Katy posted with her permission--

"below is my lengthy exchange with US Congresswoman Karen Bass re: SOPA/PIPA. thought you guys might be interested to read it... :) okay, back to writing my SCREENPLAY!!!

Dear Representative Karen Bass,

As your constituent, I’m writing to urge you to very seriously
consider your actions with regards to SOPA and PIPA and to please vote
down these efforts to censor the internet. Your vote and conduct on
this matter are being paid great scrutiny by a vast majority of voting
citizens – and by thousands more who will be voting soon or may find
this issue as the gateway to becoming engaged in citizenship (a
privilege otherwise taken for granted or scoffed at with great and
often sincere cynicism – and sadly, with good reason). This is a
profound opportunity to engage with them, as an elected official who
will eventually seek re-election, and more importantly as a civil
servant who has been hired to listen.

I’m writing because I urge you to see that this is more than the sort
of hot button, chain email, facebook blitz, fad on twitter response to
a popular issue, here one day and gone the next – the sort we’ve all
grown unfortunately so used to absorbing and forgetting in what has
become an endless kicking of the hornet’s nest, sensation cycle.

So for this upcoming vote, for the next ten times this issue is
brought forward under another acronym or guise, perhaps less
publicized or poorly defended, please remember, the significance of
this matter to your constituents, present and future.

Please oppose SOPA and PIPA and other efforts to censor the internet.

With Regards,

Katherine Hilton

U.S. Rep. Karen Bass

[in response to my earlier letter, which I sent to her, as well as Senator Boxer and Congressman Schiff]

Dear Katherine Hilton,

Thank you for sharing your concerns regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261). I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

As you may know, the bill was introduced in the House on November 16, 2011 and has since been referred to the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet where it awaits further action. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) aims to protect content producers by punishing web companies which host unauthorized copyrighted content such as movies, songs, or software and allows content producers to stop these sites from illegally distributing their content. Current law has only allowed legal action to be taken against sites that are hosted within the United States, and this bill would expand the law to prevent foreign-hosted websites from also infringing on the intellectual property rights of content producers.

Job creation is a high priority of mine and it is certainly vital to the stimulation of our economy. The Stop Online Piracy Act will work to ensure that industries are able to continue to create jobs and provide steady paying wages for content producers. It seeks to ensure that content producers and law enforcement have the necessary tools to protect intellectual property from counterfeiting and online piracy.

California's 33rd Congressional District is home to numerous film and music industries and rest assured that while I am committed to maintaining civil liberties and access to information for all, I am sensitive to the copyright challenges facing the creative community. I will continue to keep your views in mind as the bill is furthered developed and discussed in Congress.

Thank you again for writing. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I may be of any further assistance. If you would like to learn more about my position on other issues important to the 33rd district, please visit my website at karenbass.house.gov or sign up for my e-newsletter.

Sincerely,

U.S. Rep. Karen Bass

[My response to Rep. Bass]

Dear Representative Karen Bass,

I appreciate your response and the information you’ve provided on why you might support SOPA/PIPA legislation. I wish to respectfully respond to the points you’ve made in your email to me.

Firstly, this argument addresses only the internet’s use as a digital marketplace, and only from the perspective of very massive corporate interests. The internet is certainly an incredible source of revenue generation – due much in part to the driving force of innovative sites that trail-blazed the creation of an online community of consumers in the first place. In terms of your argument regarding job creation and the creative economy, I urge you to take the time to speak with local creative entrepreneurs and to people who conduct a small to mid-sized business online and otherwise in our community. They have helped build the internet as a digital marketplace as well and they contribute an incredible amount to the creation of jobs and expansion of the creative economy. Especially in Los Angeles, individual artists and creative workers are an immense and economic driving force. Some recent research (published by the Otis College of Art and Design) that has been done on this very topic, you may want to read:http://www.otis.edu/creative_economy/download/2011_Otis_Report_on_the_Creative_Economy.pdf

Additionally, if larger industries wish to take advantage of the platform for commerce that the internet provides to them, then the onus of protecting their interests in that marketplace cannot be entirely foisted onto the backs of the entire digital community – the very same community that offers them a massive consumer base. The internet has drastically shifted how we consume copyrighted material. I cannot imagine anyone disputing this point. However, I believe these industries, most affected by these shifts, ought to be responsible for the burden of adjusting their own business practices, if they want to continue to remain competitive. It is certainly to their long-term benefit to do so. Some interests in the film, music and publishing industries may eventually win this particular battle in terms of stricter regulations (though I sincerely hope they don’t), ones that they believe will benefit their profits. However, in the long run, the marketplace has fundamentally changed. These are stop gap, misguided measures and eventually, if they do not also fundamentally change how they do business, they will fail and will have missed an enormous opportunity to remain economically booming.

This legislation caters to a denial of the reality of digital commerce and to the power-mongering of large corporate and lobby interests that seem to feel they can afford to push not only domestic but also international webhosts and internet providers around to suit primarily their singular needs as an industry trying to plug the leaks of a changing economic landscape. In supporting this legislation, I feel you are supportive of an approach that offers a ham-fisted solution to a complex problem, but only to the highest bidder and at the expense of many other business and personal interests.

Secondly, your response does not in any way acutely address the fact that the internet is not just a digital marketplace. It is tremendously more – a forum for education, for artistic expression and inspiration, and a free virtual environment to many who live physically in a place that denies them many freedoms otherwise. Other oppressive nations may be the first example that springs to mind with regards to my last example. But this is true in our own country as well, where a free and uncensored internet offers extraordinary tools for seeking justice or due recourse and connecting to otherwise inaccessible resources for so, so many. This legislation would have vast and terrible censorship repercussions on the internet as a tool for these purposes.

And the point I most strongly want to make is that the internet only provides these bigger industries with such a significant source of potential revenue, because it is also currently thriving as a source for these many other things. That is the very reason an enormous consumer base is on the internet, available with their credit cards and offering up a constant stream of tremendously valuable market research to these same interests with their online activity.

Finally, to address criminal activities this legislation purports to seek to prevent, I fundamentally disagree with the approach and rationale you are condoning with your support of this legislation. The concept that a company would be made liable for the actions of the users of its site is exceedingly punitive and simply makes no sense with regards to how individual consumers actually use the internet. It is the wrong approach and while it could yield some desired results for the corporate interests supporting this legislation, I believe it would have profoundly damaging results to the online economy overall, as well as setting a dangerous precedent for allowing profit to dictate censorship.

In this instance, having read the content of SOPA (H.R. 3261), to my understanding, it seems primarily concerned with an overall effort to very strongly enforce and append existing regulation regarding copyrighted material. I also think it proposes to apply enforcement and liability in a manner consistent with privately owned property. While copyrighted material exists online and is subject to regulation to protect interests of owners (and should be), the internet is not privately owned. It is public, much as a park is public, and can be used for many purposes. And like a park, I think there should absolutely be some rules as to how it is used, rules that protect those on the playground.

For example, a park is a place where children congregate. So we have laws that dictate to different extents, how close a person convicted of crimes involving children can be to that park. But in terms of how we enforce those laws, because the park is public, we do not put a metal cage around it and demand any and all adults who enter to submit to a background check before entering. I imagine there are protective parents that wish we would (and I could understand them feeling that way) and we might very well catch a larger number of those in violation of these laws. Probably, we’d catch other violations of all sorts. But to impose this type of enforcement would run counter to the foundational principle that in this country, private citizens are presumed innocent unless (not until) proven guilty. Also, to do so would make the park no longer a park. It would become something else entirely.

The example I’m offering has to do with protecting children, an inarguably noble ambition, most of us would agree – and still, we generally recognize as a society the value of the principles that dictate an open and free use of community space. In the instance of SOPA and other similar efforts to censor use of the internet, it’s primarily sacrificing these principles for the sake of enforcing regulations regarding the profits of large corporate interests. My example is certainly not meant to equate protecting children and seeing to it that Joe Shmoe had better damn well pay to watch the latest episode of ‘True Blood’ – that would be kind of absurd, wouldn’t it?

My point is that how we enforce regulations imposed on copyrighted material matters – and the continuous debate put forth regarding whether or not piracy and streaming illegal content is bad, is actually cloud cover for what’s really at stake with how this legislation could be implemented. While I understand from recent reportage that SOPA is not likely to be passed at this time, I’m taking the time to respond in this way because I’m certain this will not be the last we see of this type of legislation. There is too great a deal of money on the line, unfortunately.

So again, I ask that you please reconsider your stance on this matter.

With Regards,

How the Irish save Christmas for Roberto... a miracle with help from United and Continental Airlines

2010-12-22T10:10:00.000-08:00

On the morning of Dec. 22 I got phone call from my sister Tammie, her friend, a young man in the Airforce, Roberto, was stuck in Dublin Airport trying to get home for Christmas "Doesn't your friend Elaine live in Dublin? She asked... and this is what happened next

Abie rallied his troops/tweeples on Twitter, which allowed Elaine to say 1000 people where tweeting about Roberto--

From: Elaine Doyle

Subject: last night

Date: December 22, 2010 5:18:17 AM PST

To: Abie Philbin Bowman , Belinda Casas , Belinda Casas

... was amazing :D

Ok - so. Where to start?!

Start at the ending: Roberto's on his way home.
Which is the most perfect ending of all :D

The story became one of technology and bureaucracy, and people being kind. Because even when the system's a bit borked, people are rather marvellous, aren't they?

Where you left off: Roberto was manfully guarding the (empty) Continental stand in the airport.
His best hope, or so we thought, was to get put on stand-by for the 9am Continental flight to Newark: and by god, he was going to be top of the queue.

Meanwhile, I've passed the fourth circle of hell of telephone menus, and am cheerfully blazing through to the fifth.
I talk to kind women (why women? and yet, always women) named Shirley and Joyce and Carol, who sigh at their screens, and ruefully inform me that nothing can be done.

There are complications.
Complications? Surely there's nothing simpler than a man, and a plane with empty seats?
No, no, for the system creates knots, and they unravel slowly. Over the course of six hours it emerges that: there are no less than five separate ticket numbers for Roberto (aHA!), and at least three different booking numbers (where there should be one). There is a plane in London; no, Paris. Can he get to Paris by Christmas Eve? No, Air France will bring him, on the 23rd. No, that's no use, because Charles de Gaulle is closed. No, it's open. No, it's Schrodinger's airport, neither open nor closed but existing in some kind of existential angst (how French!), where it's best not to look at it lest it notice our thieving eyes, and *change*. There are no flights out until the 27th. There are flights out, but Roberto can't have any. Roberto is special. Roberto is chosen. Roberto is a man at an airport, with a four year old child and a pregnant fiancée, and an undressed Christmas tree because four year olds don't think you can dress a tree without daddy. Roberto is special. Roberto is a man with more codes and numbers than the average logarithm book, and more potential airmiles than Santa Claus himself. Most of all, most clearly, most unchangeably: Roberto is in Dublin airport.

We decide that his best chances are with actual people, on the ground, in Dublin itself.
I have faith that the Continental booth, when it opens, can do what people in telephone centres cannot.

It is 5am.
I bring my laptop upstairs, and sit drifting in bed.

Roberto hasn't eaten. The lady from the booth next to Continental has noticed his lonely, determined vigil. Why don't you get some food, honey? Because Emma is four, and Emma needs her daddy for Christmas.
She looks at him, and reaches for a food voucher.
He isn't booked with her company. It doesn't matter. She will keep his place; she will make sure Continental, should they open, won't give it to anyone else.
Roberto races upstairs and grabs some food, eating it en route.

I am neither awake nor asleep.
I read a book, but I'm not quite sure what I've read.
It is 5.30am.
A text from Roberto.
Continental can't put him on standby, because the codes don't work, and he doesn't know why.

Oh-sweet-mother-of-all-things-holy.

I look at the text. There are clearly seats on that plane to Newark.
The problem: the Roberto's booking is with United, but the plane belongs to Continental. This isn't a problem of seats; this is a problem of *bureaucracy*.
I hate fucking bureaucracy.
I start ringing United Airlines again.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an airlines in possession of some planes, must be in need of a telephone menu tree.
I am on hold; I am reciting reservations letters to empty silence.
'C'
A deadened automated computer system tries to decipher my accent. 'Do you mean B? Press 1 if correct.'
No, C, C, C as in Cat.
'Do you mean V? Press 1 if correct'
No, no, C, C, C as in Christmas, C as in Can't You Just Hand Me To A Person. C as in Christ-on-a-bike.

The voice-activated telephone tree.
I figure out how to bypass it.
*Yes*.

A woman – what was her name? Quinoa? No, Elaine, that's a foodstuff – makes a breakthrough. If we cancel the (unreliable, unlikely) 23rd Dec booking to Paris, we can book a ticket with Continental for the 27th. Crucially, this allows us a sequence of numbers that lets us into Continental's computer system. We are hackers; we are Angelina Jolie when she had short hair and a vial of blood around her neck and was magnificently hot in a full-lipped, big-eyed wonderous way. Hack the world! Wait, what? Cancelling the 23rd flight to Paris, means cancelling the only firm, actual booking Roberto has been given so far. It's a huge gamble. But there is a plane, in Dublin, right now, and it's going to Newark.

I ring Roberto.
He starts laughing.

I'm not a gambling man, Elaine.

I don't say anything.
I don't know that I could cancel the only ticket I had.
I don't know if I could give up my one plane ticket, however precarious, when people have been sleeping for three days in Dublin airport.
I don't have a four year old child.

Roberto laughs again.
Cancel it.
Cancel the flight to Paris.
Get that code.

Roberto hands his cell phone over to the Continental booth lady in Dublin airport. Her voice is urgent but controlled; a mixture of east coast America and Dublinese.
She can't guarantee a damn thing.
There's a plane to Newark, but it's already overbooked by four seats, which means she already needs four people to get *off* that flight.
Carefully, she constructs a cardboard promise, made of goodwill and kindness. Cancel the flight to Paris. Get the code from United. Just get the code.

I ring United.

I can't get the code.

They won't cancel the flight to Paris, and if they did, it wouldn't help Roberto, they insist. I insist otherwise. There is a plane, there are seats, there is a man. This is simple, guys.
They know not of the healing, nutritious, mystical woman named for Quinoa and her excellent advice.
They know not why Quinoa would *give* such advice.
They know not of bending rules.

I am in the vortex again, and Dante is peering over my shoulder.

There are no international standby flights! (yes, there are, they're the only seats going out of Dublin right now) There are no seats! (yes, there are) Can't he get a train under the sea to Paris? (... .... ) The next available flights are from Heathrow! (that's nice, but you know Dublin isn't in the UK, right?)

I am polite, I let the conversation finish, I hang up.
And I ring again.

Roberto is waiting on his cell. One person enters the standby queue ahead of him. Then two. Then three, four, five.

Finally: a voice from United. Why yes! We can do that. Would I mind holding for a few moments.
I hold my breath.

Roberto is somehow, inexplicably, achingly cheery. I can hear him in the background, my cell phone held to my left ear, my landline to the right. In the cell, Roberto is joking with fellow passengers. He bumps into someone, he apologises profusely.
The man has been sleeping in Heathrow since last Saturday.
I am grumpy mcgrumpypants if I don't get at least 5 hours sleep every night.

A code! I have a code, I have a code, I have a code, I have a code, I have a code, I have a code, I have a code, I have a code, I have a code, I have a code, I have a code, I have a code.

Roberto joins the standby queue again, but the American-Dublinese-Continental-booth holder, she of cardboard kindnesses, she spots him. Sir! Sir. Sir, I have your place for you here.
I am placed by invisible hands to her ear.
I am still holding two phones; she is on the cell.
Code? (the fierce urgency, again)
I recite the numbers. My accent has become a strange mixture of 1950s RP and 1950s Westerns. Fuck voice activation. She understand me anyway. As I recite the last number, she literally drops the cell into Roberto's hand, and begins typing.
He can't stop laughing.

Oh god oh god oh god oh god. My toes are cold against the downstairs carpet.

He's on.
He's on the standby list, and he's still first on the list.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now, it's just a matter of waiting - but he's first on the list, and at this point, it's clear that a connecting flight from Heathrow has decided that being in the sky is for chumps and the weak. People who would otherwise be on the flight to Newark - they haven't made it as far as Dublin. I am sad for them. That is sad. But their loss is Roberto's gain - predicted, with eery good grace, by Abie half a night ago. There will be seats; in fact, there are 30 spare seats.

Thanks be to the little elves and their little edible socks.

My cell is out of charge; I have tied it to the wall of my bedroom. It is on silent; everyone else in the house is asleep.
Each text from Roberto lights up my room.
He has checked in his luggage.
He has a ticket.
He has a window seat (8F).
He's getting on the plane, he's going home, he's going home, he's going home.

His texts are literally full of light.

It is 8am, and I despite myself, I lie down and fall adrift, a confusion of flights and movement and Christmas. I dream of snow and light. I dream of quinoa.

***********

Belinda: Roberto? Jesus, what a stellar bloke. Really, really lovely. I've heard of the waiter-test before (look at how people treat staff, it reveals a lot). I also say - look at the airport-test. How to people behave when they're under pressure?
He was kind, funny, good humoured and absolutely determined.
He was brimming over with love for his wife Melissa, and for his baby girl Emma, and the baby girl (Molly Rose!) yet to be.
What a lovely, lovely family :)

Thank you, for acting as angel last night.
You're *wonderful*.

Abie: you magnificent bastard, you :D You predicted the eventual outcome at, what, 1am? You are an airline ninja. I kowtow to your superior airport-ju.

Lessons:
1. People are lovely.
2. People are really, really lovely.
3. People want to help.
4. The world is full of casual kindness (a food voucher, a bending of rules, a vibrating human thread of kindness through all the madness).
5. If you're in trouble, you really, really want Belinda on your side ;)

HUGE love to you both :D

Happy Christmas!

E

trout - Belinda Casas

2008-07-21T22:40:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamt I was a copper and green speckled trout, swimming in a clear swiftly running mountain stream.

Not much of a narrative to that.

Often times when I dream, George Clooney is my janitor. He works in the building where I work and he gives me silent advice. Like, I’m about to say something stupid at a meeting and he’s mopping down the hall, he catches my eye and shakes his head ever so slightly “No.” So I keep my mouth shut.

In other dreams I’m at Disneyland and he’s sweeping up the park near Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. I’m trying to decide which land to go to next and he sweeps his way toward Fantasyland and blamo! I’m having a great spin on the teacups and George gives me a sly smile as he ambles away with his broom.

this was inspired by charissa's d'landia photo.

Question #58. Do you make friends easily? -Belinda Casas

2008-07-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, but finding all the right ingredients for the recipe is getting harder and harder.

3 - 3 1/3 lbs of brain* (try to find a good firm but not too runny brain, a nice pink to light gray) If you are making animal friends reduce the brain size slightly but remember to increase the size of heart proportionally.

10 -12 oz. of heart, look for undamaged heart (very rare) but if heart is only slightly damaged this can usually be repaired by soaking it in the milk of human kindness for 13 new moons.

Bones, skin, teeth, nails ect. Have fun with this part! The more you mix and match ingredients the better. And don't forget to add fat.*

*If you are making friends in show biz skip this ingredient.

Slow cook at 98.6º for 9 months, voila!

the worth of gold -Belinda Casas

2008-07-16T15:30:00.001-07:00

Lilith dreamed her father was alive. She was at a house with a courtyard, reminiscent of but nicer than her childhood home. She could hear but not see her mother, as if her mother hadn't been dead long enough to materialize.

Then Lilith's dream world popped into extreme 3-D, steeped in smell, taste and color.

Her father appeared in the doorway. He was no longer emaciated, the weight and color of an Egyptian mummy, with papery skin stretched from cheek to jowl. He was whole, plump and filled with calming strength.

Lilith gathered him into her arms expecting him to melt away but she felt his breath. He told her she was worth her weight in gold and in her heart she felt this to be true.

When she woke she was laughing and crying.

Why is Kat smiling? -Belinda Casas

2008-07-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

Elena strolls down the 3rd Street Promenade with her friends, Steve and Kat, on a Sunday morning. They laugh at the crowds cued up outside the Apple Store, who wait, patient as monks, to purchase their new iPhones.

Kat’s an artist, she paints female erotica, acrylic on canvas in jewel tones. Steve’s an acupuncturist, compact and well muscled, he's a beautiful Asian man. Elena produces films.

Kat prowls, measuring the crowds with an artists eye, she casually discards the uninteresting. Elena stops to give an organ grinder’s monkey a dollar. He takes the bill, digs his teeth into her new black halter dress and tugs it to one side, exposing her softly rounded breasts.

Kat smiles, at last something worth painting.

question 34 - Belinda Casas

2008-07-11T23:46:00.000-07:00

34. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?

If I were a crayon I would try not to be a color, so that I wouldn't get all used up, I would hide near the edge of the box and wish I were a refillable pen. I'd obsess about a horrible senseless death by being slowly ground into nothing as I was smeared across endless pages.

I had never taken a moment to look at the world from the point of view of a crayon. Question 34 took me by surprise. I had no idea I felt that passionately about waxy pigments.

It made me begin to think about other questions like If I were a cloud what kind of cloud would I be, nimbus, cumulus? And would it make any difference, I mean wouldn’t I just dissipate? Or precipitate?

Ah…I usually avoid the hard questions.

earth sea - Belinda Casas

2008-07-08T21:38:00.000-07:00

The Belleds swam.
There was no day or night or stars or earth or sea.

As they swam they summoned voice and then song and song filled the nothingness. They sang harmony and summoned the light and the light divided the mass and the mass divided the dark and the dark framed and caressed the light and still the Belleds sang.

And stars and planets sprung whole and danced to their song. And the dance sparked life, seeded from the light and the dark and birthed by the whirling mass and creation was unleashed.

The Belleds song summoned water, water undulated and thrummed and summoned the Belleds to communion. And the Belleds sang leviathan and then entered the bodies of the masters and sang our watery world into existence.

Post Pan - Belinda Casas

2008-07-06T22:08:00.000-07:00

The great god Pan was pissed. Through a woman's trickery, he'd been trapped in an onerous Panda ceramic since the 1960's. He'd plotted his revenge for over fifty years. The woman in question was long dead but he possessed the skills to drag her spirit back from whatever level of hell she currently occupied. His revenge would be savored, cold, sweet and eternal.

Jill laughed as she listened to the god's pathetic plans. She'd been tuned into Pan since she was a toddler. He terrified her then, the voice of her constant nightmares. But now she knew who she was, he no longer held sway over her thoughts. Grandmother had taught her well. The old gods have feet of clay. We call in our own luck, in this brave new world.

(please click on this link to see Charissa's Panda Surprise photo that inspired this story)

the man who inspired wall-E to dance

2008-07-05T00:14:00.000-07:00

It is the 4th of July, 2008. I went to see the movie wall-E again today and half way through I burst out crying...

Clips from the movie Hello Dolly are featured in the film and at certain point wall-E tries to recreate the dance. Why would this bring me to tears? Because the man who choreographed the film Hello Dolly died last year, his name was Michael Kidd. He was the kind of choreographer who made everything look easy, like you could do it even if you were a lonely little robot.

Michael isn't credited in the film instead there is a short credit for the "clip" from Hello Dolly.

I had the very good fortune to know Mr. Kidd in his later years, he was a huge Mac enthusiast, always challenging himself to learn something new. He met my best friend, Chuck in a Mac store several years ago, Chuck recognized him, Michael was shocked and flattered, he was in his 80's at the time and determined to learn the ins and outs of Final Cut Pro, which he did of course. He and Chuck remained close friends until the day he died.

He was a lovely and generous man and because of him I was able to spend an astonishing afternoon with one of my personal heroes Blake Edwards. Blake and his wife Julie Andrews were among his closest friends.

When you see the movie please know that wall-E's dance moves are unmistakably Michael's. I think he would have been very proud to know that his wonderful choreography lives on in this amazing film. He was an American original and it is most fitting on this 4th of July that he is remembered and given credit for that thing he did best...
making dance look as effortless and essential as breathing.

here is his 2007 obituary from the New York times

Tumble Walls - Belinda Casas

2008-07-02T11:43:00.000-07:00

(listen to Olga's haunting one minute song while reading)

Jill cradles her sister's head as she weeps in the cemetery. Agnes has spent her entire life trying not to slip between worlds, now she tumbles.

She is a mother of two, head of the PTA, married to a councilman, a former Miss Redding and a good Republican.

As she watched her youngest daughter flame into blue and fly away into the night with a myth, a Phoenix, her beliefs cracked wide open.

Moments before the boy with wings was dead but her daughter and sister sparked him back to life, with a touch and a breath, they shattered Agnes meticulously constructed walls of denial.

“I hate you for this.” she says.

“I know”, Jill touches her sister’s ear, blue sparks flare between them.

“It's not too late Agnes, Let’s dig up Mason.”

Part one and two can be read here

Flame - belinda casas

2008-06-30T19:29:00.000-07:00

Maya holds her mother's hand as she stares at her naked and very dead boyfriend. Her aunt arranges his body on the mortician's table, trying to avoid the feathers. Orange at the base and tipped with vermilion they spring from his scapula like arrows.

Agnes bleats, "Maya, please, your soul, you can’t!"

Maya releases her mother and puts a hand on the corpse's thigh. "I'm ready aunt Jill."

In a breath the two women are transformed into columns of blue pulsing flame.

Agnes shuts her eyes. “ Mary mother of God, pray for us sinners now-”

The hungry flame races along Maya's tapered fingers up the corpse's thigh. His pubic hair ignites, his eyes flick open but before he screams the flame devours them all.

Then... he breathes.

(part one, Resurrection, can be read here)

Salt - Elaine

2008-06-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

He gave her salt, and breadcrumbs, and pennies for fortune.

Don't turn around, he said. You'll turn into a pillar of salt. A pocketful is all you need – scattering the grains into her hand – enough to taste, and savour, and sing. Too much salt, and the wounds will open up and weep for pain.

But she wanted to become his pillar, tall and true next to him, even if it dissolved her in the act. She wanted salt.

When she was small, her grandmother taught her to treat a spill with reverence. Scoop up the grains, she said, and throw a pinch over your left shoulder. For luck.

When they said goodbye, he leaned his wet cheek on her shoulder, a sudden and unexpected softness. Her left shoulder, wet with salty tears.

now witness -Belinda Casas

2008-06-27T20:52:00.000-07:00

I love atheists. They are strong-minded people who relinquish their gods and myths choosing to live only in the now.

I really want to not believe but dead people talk to me and I talk back. And just last week a lovely young woman sat in my kitchen, we were having a cup of tea when she spontaneously past life regressed. She doubled over wracked in sobs, "I fucked up, I fucked up", she wailed. After, she explained that she had experienced herself as a warrior who had led thousands into a massacre.

If you weren't there this might sound silly. If you didn't know the woman you might think she was a loon. But the dead who gathered to witness her atonement were in gratitude and I… stayed in the now to honor the dead and the living.

Someone Stands - Katie Brucker (written on her blackberry)

2008-06-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

The beach had changed since last summer, but so had she. It was slightly more eroded, and slightly more littered; ironically she had cleared most of the litter out of her life, but maybe some of her past had eroded away too. An empty lot is all that's left of a home that once stood. Someone stands looking to see if they are the one to rebuild upon the foundation that may be salvaged. It seems a distant memory now, what this beach once was. Perhaps it changes a bit everyday, yet the changes are only noticed when you don't see her for a while.

Blue TV Screenlight - Elaine

2008-06-25T16:16:00.000-07:00

The light is falling through my bedroom window.

In daytime, there is simply day; but now, the light has weight. For now, everything is saturated or forgotten, molten or deathly cold.

I watch as light moves away. My arm is drained of colour and made grey.

If I move, this overlapping set of strings will collapse, fall inwards, tangled, irreversible and corrupt. So I don’t. I stay absolutely still. I have found a place to stay here, beneath this lattice of humming lines. I hear them hum, I hear them sing.

Through the carnage and tripwires, there is a song, and it is mine. I think of Joni, and blue tv screenlight.

I know that I'm singing about you, but I'm pretending not to.

Hooplah! - Belinda Casas

2008-06-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

"You must poo-ush against the hoop, like this.” Tash recalled her first hula hoop lesson. Queen Na, from Ghana had taken pity on her. Na's daughter, Akusua, was an actress in a movie Tash had written. They all hula hooped on the set but each time Tash tried her hoop dropped stubbornly to her ankles. Magically, seconds after following Queen Na's instructions she hooped slowly and sensually as if the spirit of the African queen had taken hold of her.

That was 10 years ago, she hadn’t picked a hoop up since. Now here she was at a Solstice gathering hooping with a group of witches and sex-perts and lesbian nurses. Strange and lovely world she thought as she spun and tossed her pink and silvered hoop into the air.

He sent her messages with ice - Elaine

2008-06-23T16:40:00.000-07:00

He sent her messages with ice.

He etched them onto frozen glass, sinuous lines over wine and whiskey. When he handed her the drink, they dissolved under her unknowing hands.

Later, he curled his tongue around ice-cubes, and licked her stomach. His messages were secret and careful, a pattern of knowing typography. He wrote an icy alphabet on her skin.

Sometimes, he would carve letters into frozen cubes. He could see them, clicking against the glass as they talked. They would melt, in plain sight – unobserved, unread, unmissed.

stained - Belinda Casas

2008-06-23T14:43:00.001-07:00

Jessie is at a dinner party in a downtown loft, listening to Tomi, a fetish performance artist, complain about a dominant partner who wanted to "fist" her onstage and how she thought that this would bore the audience very quickly.

Jessie’s silent, she thinks, fist? This woman is so delicate, fist?

Tomi goes on to explain an act she does based on the element of earth. Onstage she sits in a pile of dirt and leaves, her partner fondles her sweetly and just before she is kissed a bag of ink is smashed into her face then her head is repeatedly shoved down into the dirt.

The other guests listen, politely bored.

Jessie sees the woman’s lovely unstained face and wonders how she cleans it off? How does she wash it all away?

Gerry - Elaine

2008-06-20T17:24:00.000-07:00

Gerry has a weakness for old shops.

Do they know? Like a forgotten child in the playground, the sight unnerves him.

It's ok, he thinks. We see you. We still see you.

It's always a relief when someone else walks in.

There's one shop, in particular, that he visits. A woman with shocked hair sits at the counter. They have no bread - just milk, and some papers, and some grubby-looking cans. When you step inside, you leave the light behind at the doorway. He grabs a paper - the first one to hand - and pushes it towards her; half-embarressed, resolute.

There is no click of the register; no tags on the goods, even. She counts out his change slowly.

In the half-light, he's glad she can't see his face.

resurrection - Belinda Casas

2008-06-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

Jill’s been driving for hours; Mt Shasta looms in the moonlight, almost there. Her niece, Maya is grieving but Jill prays she’s convinced her to break into the mortuary, steal Kyle's body and burn it.

She shuts off her lights and engine as she rolls up into her sister's immense circular driveway. She parks, “cha-chunk”, the sound of a shotgun cocking. Her sister whispers, "Monster, you stay away from Maya, she can’t ever know, it’s inhuman.”

Jill bargains, "We can bring him back to life Agnes, help us. Don’t let Kyle rot like Mason did.”

Maya appears from behind her mother, eyes puffy with tears she steps between her aunt and the shotgun. "Shoot or come with us.”

Agnes dissolves, “Oh Maya, don’t you trust her lies.”

She dreamed of staying awake - Elaine

2008-06-18T19:28:00.000-07:00

She dreamed of staying awake.

She dreamed of castles and crashing doors; of monsters and the sudden brightness of a white wall.

She dreamed of becoming a building. Lying in bed, she stretched, and dug polished floors into sandy loam. Her fingers, darkened creepers, clasped her head and tangled with ropey bedsheets.

She dreamed of dusty sashes and a sudden fall.

She dreamed of a broken life, of poetry and warnings, of fire and dust, of flattened mountains and shattered skies. She dreamed of laughter and light, and things her heart stretched to see.

In the dawn, the scattered shards fell around her feet. She stepped on the pieces on the way out the door.

Cup of Joe - Belinda Casas

2008-06-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

The coffee cups were a ceramic record of their lives together. They loved sipping dark sweet scalding brew from over sized cups decorated with Carnegie-Mellon University logos, laughing cows, a Calvin and Hobbs cartoon, his and hers surfboards, hand painted Italian roosters and a baby, he used to call it, their baby.

When she was sure he was gone for good, she took all the cups outside and smashed them against the back wall, afterwards she was spattered with specks of blood where the flying shards had cut into her skin.

She gathered up the pieces and turned them into a mixed media art piece entitled "I don't know... they just broke up"

She sold it for fifteen hundred dollars but it didn't make her feel any better.

Sleeping Birds - Elaine

2008-06-16T18:50:00.000-07:00

There is a type of moth

That drinks the tears of sleeping birds.

They hook under the eyelid,

Barbed and probing,

Drinking deep.

There is no malice.

To pretend like there might be, is to miss the point.

They probably need the salt.

It is tempting to see a metaphor:

The unknowing bird sleeps –

The moth, shaking with tremulous beauty –

Lifts and cuts

Quietly.

The tears fall

Pale and glistening,

to the welcome mouth below.

The suffering of one

Sustains the other

Even if no harm is meant.

It cannot help its own design.

It has no choice about how it drinks, or that it drinks at all.

And yet.

The bird does not waken.

Does it hurt so much, then?

Does it matter?

Maybe our tears are meant to have a purpose.

The bird cries, even when sleeping

Under tightly clenched lids.

The moth finds

A more lovely end

Than quiet despair

The symbols and signifiers

Becomes water once again

Just salty water

Everywhere, and every drop a drink.

Maybe it knows.

Cutting through papery skin

and tender,

A nick

A necessary barb, no more

Each cut is a holding clench

A hooked necessity

Pulling the tears back

Down stinging lines

And away from where they sat, formed but unshed,

Uncried

And stagnating.

And the bird wakens

Old tears drawn away

By the small but insistent cuts

Of a small intruder.

Small hurts, but larger hurts undone.

no love tonight - Belinda Casas

2008-06-16T01:07:00.000-07:00

She stares into a Margarita the size of a spa. He says "You can love me, but don't fall in love with me."

A week before they'd devoured one another. A week before, he'd made her come until her knees shook, made her come until she laughed, made her come until she'd begged him to stop. Now, he's waiting for her to say something. She licks the salt from the rim of the glass and thinks about the way he tastes.

She’s a writer. He’s a welder, he welds titanium parts for high performance race cars.

“You can love me, but don’t fall in love with me.”

His sentence floats like a turd in a toilet bowl. She catches the waiter’s eye and says “cheque, por favor.” Then she pulls a wad of cash from her jeans, drops it on the table and walks.

Orpheus - Elaine

2008-06-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

Orpheus paused before he reached daylight.

Maybe love is killed by thought itself. Thoughts are too loud with only silence behind us. Without a counterweight, words are chaotic.

He had tested his heart. When he had something to fight, he fought it. But he was undone by his aloneness in that twosome.

I picture him there, light on his face, tasting the dank and damp in his mouth. He was close enough to feel the lighter air mingling with the heavy. He risked himself. He had dared to imagine her into being again, from the half-remembered echo of what his heart once knew. But she was a ghost, therefore nothing. What if he risked everything, for nothing?

Orpheus paused before he reached daylight, and there was only silence.

Friday the 13th, channeling Jackie Collins - Belinda Casas

2008-06-13T18:50:00.000-07:00

"Gertrude, here." Answering her own phone was a small price to pay for firing her tacky assistant, Tif. Since she'd begun answering her own calls two days ago, it had caught on though out the Industry. From Endeavor to CAA agents enjoyed making their assistants tremble as they answered their own calls and became aware of exactly who their peons were plotting with, as always information became ammunition.

“Hello Hotness”, Marlow rasped. Gerty braced herself, this had to be bad news. “…and so that’s why I’m moving on with Tif.”

Gerty had tuned out on Marlow after he whined about leaving her talent agency, he was her biggest client, so Tiffany must be decimated. Ah, what fun, she loved her job, it kept her sharp.

Basketball just ain't the same on the mainland - Nicholas Vaky

2008-06-13T18:49:00.000-07:00

At the court thinking about new shoes in the mail and former high school glory. Street ball in Hawaii is fun for a 6'2" white boy because most Hawaiians are short, so I can muscle inside even though I'm skinnier than Mick Jagger. Today though, larger white boys, middle-class republican jocks, will put me in my place. White boys here play to humiliate, they have something to prove. Not like in Hawaii: home of the best marijuana on earth where laid back games focus on who can pull the craziest shit. But here, trying to play a physical game, my slight frame will be no match, and it's easy for a 6'5" guy to block my jump shot. It's enough to make a man want to cancel his new $50 shoe order.

Sea on My Skin - Elaine

2008-06-11T15:56:00.000-07:00

I can still smell the sea on my skin. I lick the back of my hand, and taste salt.

Earlier, we picked our way between the cows, along the banks of pitted grass. At the beach, we slip into the water, three circles of movement in the stillness. We don't touch.

Overhead, the moon is brightly distant. I watch your face.

Our footprints leave damp imprints on the sand when we leave. There is a pause at the rocks. I don't know if it's said aloud. I just remember taking off my swimsuit, walking naked to the water.

The light glances off your shoulder, an orb of white. He has unexpected curves. I look forward, and stand up very straight.

The water is cooler to the touch this time, and more touched now. My arms glitter - I swim through stars.

My Bad - Belinda Casas

2008-06-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

Gertrude was aghast. She was also a bitch. I hated working for her but hey, 600$ a week plus reject SWAG bags isn’t easy to come by in this town. Gerty’s ob/gyn had just diagnosed her with a nasty case of crabs, now I had to call everyone she’d hooked up with in the last 6 weeks. This might be easy for a normal person, but Gerty was no normal agent, her clients worked! And right now they were also spreading crabs across The Industry. I knew where they came from, or at least what country. On my va-cay last month I’d had a jolly time in London… I think. I remember a photographer, a fetish ball, um using condoms, after that it’s all a blank. Then I came home and slept with Gerty’s bf. So if you see your fav star scratching blame it on me.

it started with a one minute song...

2008-06-11T08:32:00.000-07:00

before midnight tonight... 2 really short and sweet stories will be posted right here.