Well, I've been waiting for the fucking news to come on TV and right at 5:30 my stupid reception goes out. It almost makes me wish that I had cable. I guess I can tell y'all the story of the protest today. I'm not much of a protester but when they try to take one of my most favorite professors, Steve Kurtz, and do god knows what to him, I get upset ... so I went up to Niagara Square today at 9:00 am. There were a fair amount of people there maybe around 100 or so. We walked around in a circle yelling and holding signs. There was one chant about FBI and underwear that I didn't get but others were fine. I liked the "This Kurtz has no Heart of Darkness" chant but I still didn't join in (chanting I circle walked a hell of a lot). I'm not much of a group person even when it's a good group. There were people up from NYC, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Some newspaper man asked me some questions. I said Steve is nice and the FBI is mean for using his wife's death as an excuse to run off with Steve's work and try to arrest him. There were a few news stations taping. What a spectacle.
As far as how the hearing went or whatever it was I have no idea. I hope they'll just leave Steve alone. I'm mad as hell. There is still a lot of knowledge I need to suck out of that guy and how can I do it if those people (AKA embarrassed stubborn mistaken piggies with hurt egos) lock Steve up or harass him out of a job. IT'S NOT FAIR, IT'S NOT FAIR, IT'S NOT FAIR! Things had best turn out in his favor or I will be even more disillusioned with this life and that is a terrifying prospect.
Well, on slightly more personal notes thanks to you guys who offered to take Andy to the airport today. I got him there by 1 and now he's gone. So there goes my fine ass, difficult, and fun boyfriend. God only knows when we'll meet again. He had a good time here. We had a busy 5 days, lot's of birthday stuff going on.
Thursday night we went to the pink. I got drunkish and Andy had a beer. I'm now officially 23. Lots of people came out that night. The next night I can't remember so I have to think hard...oh yeah I guess I wrote about it. arguing, silence, baths, and grocery shopping.
Saturday Soyeon and I had a BBQ for out birthday. Me and Andy went over to Soyeon's to help prepare around 12:30. I had my first beer at 3 and a cheeseburger shortly there after. The people started trickling in, by the time I was drunk it was somewhat crowed.
I have to admit that I can hold my own when drinking. I ate and drank and talked and repeat that a few times. Some friends bought me this crazy old pink bike and I gave a go at riding it but in my less than sober state I was not successful. Me and Matthew got to having a conversation with an eight year old. She was the only child in attendance of our BBQ. Earlier in the night she told me "I can see your underwear." She was a sassy little thing.
I reckon Jesse has gotten over his irritation with me or whatever because he came out and stayed for a long time. He gave me a wood music playing thing and said it would be good to put weed in but I wonder how he would know such a thing since he doesn't smoke weed. We had nice dream conversation and Holly told us a crazy dream she has had involving hand eyes on a little boy. Southernyankee turned out and she and Paul made Andy laugh a lot.
I got made fun of because I told some people that "Andy is my lover." They said I may as well have said fuck buddy but I still like the word lover. It means that you love each other and you make love. Sex without love is kind of well, pointless for me, not that I think sex has some mystical meaning or anything but hmm.... I don't know. Sex is just better if you know each other. That's when it gets fun. It makes you ask each other "What can we try next?"
Back to the party... It winded down by 11, by this time I has probably consumed 5 beers, 3 wines, 2 hot-dogs, a cheeseburger, several little k
im
chee dumplings, some Korean noodle stuff, a few strawberries, 2 cups of sweet tea, a coke, 2 cups of water and I was picking at the stir fry. I'm not sure where I got room for all of it.
Well, four of us headed over to a friends house and she was gracious enough to smoke a bit of marijuana with us. Then a few more people came over and it was around that time that I realized how incredibly drunk I was. I went onto the fire escape for a few minutes and then crawled back in the window and laid on the floor with my eyes closed. Did I pass out? Why no, I did not. I listened closely to the conversation going on around me and joined in every now and again saying things that I could only say in the state that I was in.
I remember that while lying there in the darkness surrounded by familiar conversing voices I spoke to them of a dream my father said he had. Dad told me about this dream when he was driving me to Atlanta after my recent visit to GA. He said that he dreamed he was in a graveyard and he saw a tombstone. He reached down and cleared off the writing and the tombstone was his. It read Robin's dads name 1944-2017. So I told my dad "wow that's a long time away" and he looked at me and said "Robin that's only 17 years" He said it in the most heart broken voice too. In my slightly passed out state we also talked about our grandmother and how they went crazy once they got to a certain age. My Granny and a stroke and Anna's and altimeter's disease.
After I rose up from my friends floor I immediately realized that I was not feeling so well. The ever wise Holly said "if you're sick don't hold it in." So I went to the bathroom turned on the shower and blew chunks in the toilet. Then me and Andy walked back to my place. I passed out on the love seat and woke up at 3 and purged my system for a few hours. It was most unpleasant. This is the time where y'all should be considering my food consumption list from earlier. The next day Andy walked down to the store and got me some Tylenol and ravioli and I started feeling better.
Keith called a bunch and said come see the robot and American Idol's John Steven's so me and Andy walked over there for a while. Keith went in the back and put on these Daisy duke shorts that were to big for him. He wasn't wearing underwear so his crack was showing a lot. I videotaped him dancing with a robot. Then me and Andy went to eat some pizza and on the way back home we went to frizzy's and took our picture in the booth.






Then we went home and fucked and hung around here all night.
The next night we went out to soundlab for a fundraiser. There was some girl rapping to us about people keep telling her that there were 6 rapes in her neighborhood last year and it's not a big deal because to her because she thinks it's a small number compared to how many rapes actually happened and she talked about how she bets that in the white college frat boy neighborhood a few streets over that kind of thing happens just as much and so on. She was intense and good I thought.
and all that ramble leads us back to today to the beginning.

Can any of y'all car wielding friends of mine help me and Andy out tomorrow? He needs to be at the airport by 1:50 but we can't find a ride, oh no! We're both so poor now. It's sad.

Monday, June 14, 7pm, $6
The Evolutionary Girls Club presents …

• ART IS ACTIVISM FUNDRAISER ***

in support of the Critical Art Ensemble, Free Speech & Democracy
featuring 2-D, 3-D and 4-D art, poetry, performance & free food!
All door proceeds go to the CAE legal defense fund.

On May 30, members of the performance art collective Critical Art
Ensemble, an internationally-recognized group of five artists whose
work examines the politics of information technology and biotechnology,
were subpoenaed by the FBI. On Tuesday June 15, a grand jury will
convene to consider indicting CAE artist & UB professor Steve
Kurtz. The subpoenas are the latest installment in what many consider
to be a bizarre investigation in which members of the Joint Terrorism
Task Force have mistaken an art project for a biological weapons
laboratory. (More info. at www.caedefensefund.org)

The Evolutionary Girls Club works for peace through art and activism.
The group's artwork, writing, and other actions are aimed at providing
voice and access. "We believe that oppression and violence are wrong in
any form and strive to help create a world where all people are
sovereign citizens with choices about how they live in the world … our
group is committed to working through art and other forms of activism
to promote peaceful resolutions." Information about the Evolutionary
Girls can be found at

humm ... it seems to me like I'z the one who said "Keith you should stick the baby Jesus in Mary's head." I see Keith has conveniently forgotten that. Why do guys always do that? Seems like I should get a pack of smokes for my art smarts!

Me and Andy were arguing this morning. We went to eat but they didn't have what he wanted so he wouldn't eat and then he got all pissed off cause I was bothering him by telling him he should eat so he snapped at me and then we gave each other the silent treatment for a few hours. He sat in the living room and sulked while I went to my room and took a nap.
Then after I woke up he apologized to me and we took a bath together. That was fun. I haven't taken a bath with another person since I was a little bitty kid.
Soyeon came and we went to the grocery store and bought all this food for the BBQ tomorrow. Come on out y'all there's gonna be lots of good eating.

I stopped by y'alls blue house today for a water refill and I sat in the chair and admired the beautiful garden while refilling. You guys do a much better job that all of the businesses!

MOVIE REVIEW | 'BUKOWSKI: BORN INTO THIS'


A Poet Weaned on Pain and Reared by Adversity

Michael Montfort/Magnolia Pictures
The hard-living writer Charles Bukowski, who died in 1994, in John
Dullaghan's documentary "Bukowski: Born Into This."

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 4, 2004
NY Times

My father was a great literary teacher," recalls the famously scrappy,
hard-drinking poet and novelist Charles Bukowski, who died in 1994. "He
taught me the meaning of pain - pain without reason." Three times a
week, from the age of 6 to 11, he was beaten by his father with a razor
strap, he remembers in John Dullaghan's definitive and engrossing
documentary portrait, "Bukowski: Born Into This."
Revisiting his boyhood home in Los Angeles where the beatings took
place, Bukowski wryly calls it "the house of horrors" in a drawl that
filters Kevin Spacey through William S. Burroughs with a dash of
Tennessee Williams. Those beatings, he admits, were essential to the
formation of his lean, brutal literary style through which no
sentimentality was allowed to leak. When you're beaten that regularly,
he suggests, "you say what you mean."
Some of the film's interviews were done for European television.
Excerpts are skillfully woven with the reminiscences of former drinking
buddies, fellow writers and Bukowski's second wife, Linda, the keeper of
the flame, whom he married in 1985. Without straining, the film makes a
strong case for Bukowski as a major American poet whose work was a
slashing rebuke to polite academic formalism.
Bukowski didn't always revel in his outsider status. A pariah in high
school, he suffered from severe acne vulgaris, which covered his face
with running sores that left his skin deeply pitted. He recalls standing
miserably in the dark outside his senior prom, too humiliated to show
himself.
In later years Bukowski boasted of his sexual prowess. Yet he was a
virgin until he was 24, the same age at which his first story was
published. His description of sexual initiation with an obese woman whom
he wrongly accused of stealing his wallet is a spectacularly unpromising
beginning to the prolific sexual activity (described in his novel
"Women") that flowered after fame brought admirers.
Bukowski could be as pithy off the page as on. He cites as "the ultimate
compliment" being called "a good duker." He began writing at 13 because
it seemed "the easiest thing to do." Love he describes as "a fog that
burns with the first daylight of reality."
He began writing in earnest after traveling around the country for a
decade working as a laborer, drinking and brawling, and absorbing the
raw experience that informed his work. Later he supported himself as a
mail carrier for 14 years. His heavy drinking contributed to a case of
bleeding ulcers in 1956 from which he was not expected to recover. But
he went on to carouse for four more decades before succumbing to
leukemia at 73.
At the suggestion of a girlfriend he took up betting on horses as a
hobby, and it became an addiction, with the faces of the bettors and
their dreams of winning a crucial inspiration. One of his pet peeves was
Mickey Mouse, whom he said had "no soul," and he harbored a deep
loathing for Walt Disney and everything he stood for.
With the publication of a regular column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," in
the underground press, he gained notoriety beyond the world of little
magazines. His career solidified after John Martin, the founder of the
Black Swallow Press, volunteered to keep him afloat. Two decades later
Bukowski wrote the screenplay for Barbet Schroeder's 1987 movie,
"Barfly," in which Mickey
R
ourke played a Bukowski-like roustabout with
a swaggering bravado that the poet says was inaccurate. That unhappy
experience inspired his novel "Hollywood," a place he describes as "more
crooked, dumber, crueler and stupider than all the books I read about
it."
The documentary includes reverential tributes from Tom Waits, the singer
and songwriter who brought his tenderer version of Bukowskian alienation
into popular song, as well as from Bono, Sean Penn, Harry Dean Stanton
and the film director Taylor Hackford.

Subtly, without overstating the case, "Bukowski," which opens today in
Manhattan, shows its cantankerous subject mellowing with success. Near
the end of the movie, Bukowski even shows a flash of what he calls "the
bluebird in my heart who wants to get out." But then, having to be true
to his legend, he catches himself and asserts, "I'm too tough for him."
BUKOWSKI
Born Into This
Produced and directed by John Dullaghan; edited by Victor Livingstone;
released by Magnolia Pictures. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th
Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 108 minutes. This film is not
rated.





Stan Woodard
Communications Director
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
535 Means Street
Atlanta, GA 30318
404 688 1970 Ext 213
swoodard@thecontemporary.org
www.thecontemporary.org

the sounds like a good idea.

Well, happy fucking birthday to me. When I went out at 8:20 to get my bike and ride to the taco place, MY BIKE WAS NOT THERE! Last night around 10:00 I parked it in front of my building at 225 Elmwood. I locked it around a one way sign. When I went out this morning it was gone! They broke off the top of the sign and slipped the bike over the pole! I'm so sad. My bike was my baby. I tried to take such good care of it and always lock it up. It was a blue new classic schwinn with a silver basket on the front. Jesus, I feel like crying. That bike was my car. It was a Christmas present from my Dad after I got a D. U. I. so it was only 2 yrs old if that. Jesus Christ! I know I'm a bad person sometimes but what karamatillacally wrong thing did I do to deserve this? Oh lordy!

Lil ho I'm happy you read my journal! You should come to me and Soyeon's 23/33 birthday BBQ this Saturday. starting at 3:00 at 23 livingston.

It's almost 8:00 in the morning and I have to get to ETS, Elmwood taco and subs, soon for a job interview at 8:30. Keith and his friend Adam have been making fun of me a little. There're all like "Your a graduate student, you're not supposed to work at a fast food place" but I don't care. I need money God Damn it! Any of you who hang out with me for long are probably well aware of my financial straits.
I had a weird dream where I went to Madrid with a group of ten or so people. We had signed up for it individually but it turned out that a few people I knew were also going. Liz, Hope Hilton, Julie, and some other Hope, three guys I didn't know and one skinny middle aged black woman (I watched her scale a wall necked running from the guy who brought us there) we were there on a modeling job but also for school. I got freaked out because I though the guy wanted us to make porno movies. I kept saying I want to learn Spanish.
so yeah... I had a headache when I woke up so I've taken some Korean Tylenol that Soybean gave me. Andy's flight gets in at 1:35, me and Keith are going to pick him up right after I get off work at forever Elmwood. I'm supposed to be fixing a water hose in the garden at north and then painting trash cans, something like that. I think the flowers are fine on water today.
I enjoy watering the flowers. The sounds I heard are the best things. There is so much variety on ten steps from talking to cars to sirens to dogs to kids to whatever. It's nice. I met this one business owner and I think I'm going to work on his tree beds for him. He's opening a e-bay shipping kind of place, something like that. Well, I had a few beers with this guy the other night and he told me that Elmwood is like the deck of the Titanic. I thought that was interesting.
Oh yeah, I'm 23 today. It's my birthday. My Mom sent me a carton of cigarettes yesterday but she made a mistake and got me 100s at first I was disappointed but then I decided it was funny so I'm happily smoking Marlboro Red 100s for a while. Mama also sent me some pictures from their vacation so here is one of my two little nieces. My bother's wife is pregnant again so in a few months I'll have another niece
or nephew.