I stayed up all the night last night because I feared if I slept I would miss my 9 O'clock meeting. I got to the meeting almost on time and announced to Liz and Susanne my plans for selling my soul to the Devil. The seemed to support the idea even though it is not an idea inspired from the art and commemoration workshop. I showed them the documentation from the first two days of the ritual. I started in the park Goethe designed and I will end the ritual in London, then return to Weimar and hopefully set up an installation in the park.
After this meeting I went to the class and watched two presentations. The first woman's work was... pictures of blocks of ice with Brazilian aerobic tapes playing... yeah. The second woman talked about her idea for the Belgium, Art and commemoration project. She wants to make match books that say, paper burns words fly away. People had a heated critique of this idea. I just sat there and thought of the Dixie Chicks.
After that I took a 3 hour nap. Then woke up and drank a really strong espresso and went to the monument/memorial workshop. The guy showed us lots of Jenny Holzer work. I get so sick of this text based work sometimes, sure its profound but I'm more affected by the Brazilian student's performance where she put an orange sheet over her head, cut a hole for a mouth and read porno mags. I know I had a strange expression on my face when she showed us that.
So after that workshop I went home, crawled into the bed and watched today's Democracy Now. About the time the program got past the part about how the white house wants to change what some guy said in the public records, I started feeling queasy and had to go vomit. I don't know why, maybe that double shot of black espresso ripped into my stomach. A long shower worked wonders and after a few hours I felt good enough to eat some of Albrecht's pasta. Then I watched Satan's Brew and wondered why I haven't met any people like that here in Weimar.
The kids are too damn moral here. At least one kid told me that he wore his "I love Kinky Sex" t-shirt in my honor one night.
One good thing about getting nauseous is that it inspired me to wash my bed sheets for the first time since I've been here. Hallelujah, praise the lord for that! Earlier this week I changed my website a bit, I put up some collages I made from the pictures Liz, Arzu and Soyeon took this summer when I took them to my parent's house.
My Mawmaw sent me a thanksgiving card and told me to get some turkey. She put a five dollar bill in the card. I loved it but it broke my heart. Speaking of love and affection, I must get some sex soon or I will spontaneously combust. At the moment I'm listening to The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt. 1 and thinking of someone very special.

pursuit

link for ebook, Venus in Furs.

rapunzel hair totally fucked up. how can people function with hair that long? It's not like they were locked in a tower, or were they?

Yesterday I was about to start helping Naomi edit documentation of her roundabout installation when she ran up the stairs saying look at the rainbow. We ran onto the porch to see a huge rainbow. A flock of crows choose that moment to fly across the sky. It was a strange and beautiful sight, the sweet spectacle of the great outdoors.

Here is a web site where people submit their dreams and then they are made into comics. I read them all.


So I'm lying here in the bed thinking of my Mama. Last night I dreamed that I was at my parent's house and wanted to buy a peach tree that was in the trunk of my car. The tree would cost 289 dollars and I only had 20 euro, so I asked my mom for the money. She gave me what she could and made me feel guilty about it. I sat and counted the euro she gave me out in our georgia driveway.
I also dreamed about the spirit of Matthew Proctor. He was mad but I pushed the magic wand he was bopping me with to the side and hugged him. The I started shouting, "hey, listen up" to all the people in the room and reading from a letter I'd written to or about Matthew.
I woke up from that one all sweaty. I think that comes from this document I found online. Yes, I still search for Matthew even though he's dead. This document www.gasupreme.us/pdf/s05a0257.pdf gave me more details than I had before and yes even 4 year after the murder of my first boyfriend who was my ex at the time of his death, I'm still having tears for him.

This is what I had intended to write about when I first started this post however. When I was a little girl I would go on walks with my mom and she would point out the flowers to me and tell me their names, sweet peas, black-eyed-susans, honeysuckle and so on.
One day she pointed to a weed like plant that was topped with tons of tiny white blossoms and asked,

Do you know what that flower is called?
No
Kiss me and i'll tell ya
just tell me
i did

i looked all over the internet for a picture of some kiss me and i'll tell ya, but I was unable to find any. I did come across the The Legend of the Cherokee Rose and this got me to thinking about how the United States deals with commemoration.

a lady bug is girlie.

PS
I've fallen in love with the writings of David Sedaris. He explained to me myself somehow. I only want to hear more(I've been listening to his recorded readings). Why is it that the best dudes are gay dudes while I'm cursed into being a straight woman (straight but not square, mind you)?
OK Seriously... time for sleep

Lets start out happy. Here are my little darlins All dressed up for halloween. Poor crying baby, maybe lea wanted a girly costume like her big sister and cousin.



Ok on to the stuff Buchenwald stirred up in me.
I don't know why I have to keep making comparisons but that's whats compelling me so...
Here is a juxtaposition for you.




How do these things relate? Well, It's systems of classification through symbols. Man, that topless hanky dude must be a freak in the sack. Here is a link to the explanation of what the hankys symbolize, and here is a link to what the nazi triangles and stars symbolized . So when are systems of classification good and when are they bad? I think this comparison makes the answer to that question a little to simplistic.
Our guide at Buchenwald explained that queers and Jews were the prisoners that SS guards were pretty much allowed to do anything to. The Nazi's pink triangle was of course taken over, so that a symbol of oppression was turned into a symbol of pride or resistance. . This can be compared to hip hop artist taking "nigga" and flipping it around (to the shock and offense of most of their Granny's).

Alright, now to take a little look at Karl Koch and Janis Karpinski. Karl Koch was the husband to Ilse, the bitch of Buchenwald, he was a bad man, so bad even the Nazis didn't want him in the end. Janis is the woman who was in charge of Abu Ghraib Prison during the time that the torture photos surfaced .
I'm going to take excerpts from two web pages.
The first comes from the bottom of this page on the trial of Ilse Koch. (this section is about Karl Koch)

As the camps became more brutal, Koch was promoted: from Sachsenhausen to Esterwegen to Lichtenburg to Dachau, then to Columbia Street prison in Berlin, renowned for its excesses of torture. Prisoners there were locked in the doghouses, chained by the neck, and forced to lap up their food from a bowl. Anyone failing to bark when Koch walked by received twenty-five lashes with a cane. Koch had one prisoner beaten senseless, then ordered guards to stop up his anus with hot asphalt and force him to drink castor oil.

and here is a long excerpt from an interview with Col. Janis Karpinski, that was on Democracy Now a week or so ago . Col Karpinski is shifting some blame to General Miller, the man who is currently running the Abu Ghraib Prison. (I got that idea from this wiki article )

And he used the example at Guantanamo Bay that the prisoners there, when they're brought in, that they're handled by two military policemen. They're escorted everywhere they go -- belly chains, leg irons, hand irons -- and he said, "You have to treat them like dogs."

AMY GOODMAN: You were there when he said this?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: Yes, I was there when he said that. And he said, "They have to know that you are in charge, and if you treat them too nicely, they won't cooperate with you. And at Guantanamo Bay, they earn -- the prisoners earn every single thing they get, to include a change of color of their jumpsuits. When they get there, they're issued a bright orange jumpsuit. They're handled in a very aggressive, forceful manner, and they earn the privilege of transitioning to a white jumpsuit, if they prove themselves to be cooperative."

And I raised my hand. I was just there as a guest. I was not a participant, but I said, "You know, sir, the M.P.s here don't move prisoners with leg irons and hand irons. We don't even have that equipment. We don't have enough funding to buy one jumpsuit per prisoner, let alone an exchange of colors." And he said, "It's no problem. My budget is $125 million a year at Gitmo, and I'm going to give Colonel Pappas all of the resources he needs to do this appropriately."

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Colonel Pappas ran the prison within the prison, is that right? He ran something called the "hard site"?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: He ran the interrogation operations within the prison, that's correct. And it was -- Cell Block 1A and 1B were the two maximum security wings of the hard site, and during General Miller's visit, either at his order or at his request, General Miller told -- instructed Colonel Pappas to get control of Cell Block 1A.

AMY GOODMAN: Treat the prisoners like dogs. That explains the leashes and making prisoners bark?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: It seems to be consistent with those photographs, yes, with the dog collar, the dog leash and un-muzzled dogs. And, in fact, those techniques have appeared in several memorandums that have been signed by senior people.



This bit about the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, earning everything they get makes me think of another thing the kind guide of Buchenwald told me. In Buchenwald the prisoners were able to earn a chance to sleep with the prostitutes brought in. The prostitutes were told they could earn their way out of the camp this way after a year but this seldom happened. There were maybe 15 prostitutes in this all male camp.


alright, alright, enough for now. I really need to figure out what I'm doing and start keeping normal sleeping hours.

The prisoners in the camp had to build things for the Nazis. They dug tunnels and made rifles, things like that. They tried to sabatoge their progress in order to resist the Nazi regime. They had to be careful how they did it though because they would be punished with beatings and death.
My dad was drafted into the military during Vietnam. Due to an injury during training he was stationed in the pentagon doing peon work. He told me the MIT computer guys working there were bitter about their draft and would always fuck up the computer systems before their discharge.

OK more on these subjects later.


dogs treatment in nazi prison vs dog treatment in iraq prison
gay symbol(hanky in the back pocket) vs nazi symbol(red, pink, yellow triangles)

I'm so tired. my schedule is flip flopped and I've been up 20 hours now because i didn't want to miss this excursion to the Buchenwald. It was a perfect day for it, cold and rainy. The monument from the GDR is something, it's huge, like a Roman Colosseum somehow but there are also information centers. The barracks have been plowed down. Only the gate area and crematorium remain. I sleep now.