Thursday, February 25

As I Read #1

Currently Reading :: Ecstasia
Currently on; page 94


The girl is floating above. Folding out from her thin, white back are wings. They are dusted with pollen like poppies. They have veiny eyes meant to terrify predators. The girl floats on these wings, always just out of reach.
 L.A. in the future, the ocean is poison and only the young live in the city. The old (middle aged, really) go Underground to die. The young only go there for the magical drugs, which inevitably bring them to the Underground sooner for death. 


The city itself, although dark and twisted, is entirely focused on beauty and fun. Citizens dance, eat, dress in glitter and gold and gems, and spend their lives in beauty.


Huge oval mirrors in frames of silver roses reflected the tapestry cushions and the urns holding bright candy, thick chalky sticks of burning incense or transparent silk blossoms.

I'd actually like to focus on this element more, about the beauty of the world around them. It's a somewhat negative aspect of the story, (People feel forced to go Underground because they don't want to be seen by the beautiful people as ugly) but it is still beautiful, and I love to read about it, wishing the world around me were so... dolled up. :)

Rafe followed Lily up some stairs to an apartment cluttered with things, a history of things. Some were what he would have expected- stuffed bears wearing tiny hats or wreaths of dried flowers, dolls with china teeth, glass eyes and braids of real hair, embroidered gloves, laces petticoats, fan-shaped perfume flasks, jars of powders and creams. But there were other things- a wedding dress, all lace, pearls, and yellowing satin roses hung from the ceiling, its train pooling on the floor. And then there were the flowers- stiff, white lilies carefully arranged on a coffin-like dresser, the tiny, white skeletons hanging on threads, the old one's rocking chair. The walls were a collage of floating watercolor faces, origami birds, bows, postcards, and photographs.
I wonder what its like to live in a world of beauty without any meaning or use. Art for the sake of art, right?As I read I want to continue to bring out all the dark beauty of their world.

There are many issues of love, for lovers, friends, and families. The characters suffer from lost loved ones, and some end up addicted to drugs that "bring back the dead" for short periods of time (whether this is literal or in their head is questionable, but both are possible in the context).
The relationships are beautiful, both heterosexual and homosexual, and the love and loss is commonly heartbreaking.

We fall together into the cold sand, suddenly warm and fine as if it were the dust of sun-baked pearls and we, plunging into each other's forbidden, impossibly lost, impossibly found, bodies, bring each other back and back and back.



Oh, btw, I think I'd be better at writing about these things if i had someone to talk to, answer, or bounce ideas with, so please don't hesitate to leave a comment, opinion, or question!!!

Saturday, February 20

A Lily Video

A Missing Angel Juan tribute video made by a wonderful Weetzie Bat Fan named Milee (em-i-lee).
I'd like to contact her but you need a youtube account to comment on people's pages.

If anyone else would like to, you're welcome to let her know I'm putting this up. It's beautiful and well done, and makes me want to reread my second favorite Weetzie book yet again.



((Quote after the  break))

Friday, February 19

OMGosh Sprouts!! (Gardening Project Part 1.2)

omigosh! Only a few days down and sprouts already!!


It's mostly arugula, which seems to be the only leafy green I'm good at growing (it's the only one that grew in my deck garden last summer), but there's also an onion sprout and two peas! I'm so pleasantly surprised and happy! This isn't a full post, I just had to mention this because it got me so excited. I wasn't expecting to see anything for a while.
Unfortunately, I had to change the markers from the wooden sticks to the plastic ones that came with the greenhouse (i was hoping to save them) because some uber ick mold had started to grow. But at least it looks good.
Now I'm just waiting for the soil to dry out a bit before covering the house again so that mold doesn't grow again.
One more step towards a beautiful natural tasty happy place (aka veggie garden)!

For those of you who think growing a garden is hard, or they don't have room for one, don't think that way!
A small garden is a great way (i think) to do a simple, little thing that makes you feel successful and happy. When I lived in an apartment, I grew arugula and basil in pots on my small deck (i also tried other things- a lot of other things- but they didn't work so well; it was still fun though). It made me feel good to go out, pick something, then go back to the kitchen and make something to eat with something i'd grown myself! Even if it was just a salad :)


Next post, btw, should be about the language and slang terms from FLB books. They're so much fun, though not too practical for daily use, and I'd like to explore the way they're used and why they make the characters so much more unique.

Be happy!

Thursday, February 18

Magical Fire Flower

 
Her garden burgeons- irises glitter as if embedded with silver, roses turn colors no one can match.(echo)

Wednesday, February 17

Love, Love, Love

In the world of these books- in FLB's world- love is life.

It's not the kind of thing where the character doesn't enjoy life without their lover- its actually quite the opposite. Love is everywhere in these stories, love for souses, friends, family, lovers. The stories and novels are pretty much all about love and the relationships we have with people.

Any love, that is love, is right.

There is no (or little) judgment based on gender, sexuality, age, or race. People love who they love and are given the freedom to do just that.
If we could all love the way FLB's characters do, maybe the world would be better.

More after the "break"

Monday, February 15

A Day : Gardening Day 1

I don't have any intentions of turning this into a journal-style blog, but I think the occasional day-diary about certain times wouldn't hurt. So here's my first introduction into making my life better.

Yesterday was the start of my attempt at a garden. After a delicious Indian food brunch, and before a Vietnamese Beef Pho dinner with crispy roast pork and kids with firecrackers celebrating the New Year, new gardening things suddenly seemed imperative. A trip to Lowe's and 50 overpriced dollars later, and My Own Personal Almost Secret Agent Lover Man (aka Danny) were sitting around the dining room table filling little expanding puffs of soil with teeny tiny seeds.
Basil, Cilantro, Mint, Carrots, Onions (even though I don't really like them), Spinach, Arugula, Lettuce, Radishes, and Tomatoes (among others, but i don't remember them all).

 More "After the Jump"....

Saturday, February 13

How I Learned to Love Food

I love food.

No, really. I love food. Passionately.

I love exotic foods; normal, every day foods like juicy burgers and cheesy pizza, but mostly exotic foods like spicy, creamy Indian foods with minty chutneys and smooth mango juice, raw slurpy oysters covered in spicy sauces, fresh, cool, delicious sashimi (salmon and mackerel are my absolute favorite btw) and spicy tuna rolls and eat-with-your-fingers Ethiopian spicy deliciousness with spongy injera and creamy seafood pasta with clams or crab and fruit fruit fruit delicious juicy raspberries and watermelon and persimmons and pomegranates and Quenepas (which I can FINALLY get at my local international superstore in Augusts!) and Asian pears and spiky rambutans! and all the leafy raw greens I can handle sweet, spicy Korean BBQ and instant ramen from japan with fresh mushrooms and Naruto fishcake and hummus and tabbouleh and crispy falafel and....

...need I go on?

I think one of the things that led to this love is the way food (and every other sensory experience) are described in FLB books. Point in case below, I swear.

Think I'm crazy? Check out all the foods mentioned in Weetzie Bat:
(in the order they come)

((After the Jump))

Thursday, February 11

The Why Question

It's a guilty pleasure of mine that I love "How To" and FYI lists and web pages. On any given lazy day you can likely find me on Instructables or WikiHow looking up completely random things to make my life better, prettier, or just more productive.

Imagine my chagrin when I could not find a single page on how to live, eat, or beautify my world like Weetzie Bat. I searched around and found sites like the FLB Shrine, FLB Experience Page, and the FLB LiveJournal site, but none of it was what I really wanted.


The biggest problem I've seen in "How-To" pages is the way often list-maker's simply pull things (particularly objects) directly from the text/movie/what-have-you and transferring it right over to the list. There's not a lot of thought put into it, just a lot of looking and finding and copy/pasting, instead of really thinking about the characters and putting thought into how they act, live, and love.
The most recent that I can think of that demonstrates this is one I stumbled onto out of curiosity after a trip to the local Classics Theater to see Breakfast at Tiffany's for the ba-zillionth time.

How to Be Like Holly Golightly is a pretty decent (exhaustive) list of the attributes of Holly Golightly. Mostly physical things, but still great and fun to read.

What I dislike, however, is the little ones like these:
"Pink ballet slippers, to be kept in your refrigerator", "A guitar or failing that the soundtrack from Breakfast at Tiffany", or "Old fashioned black telephone- to be kept in a suitcase".
There's aren't the positive attributes and bits of lifestyle of Holly's that I want to imitate. They're charming, yes, and some of the things we love so much about the movie, but not what I'm looking to copy. I want what she's like, what she does, what she enjoys. The way she talks and eats and lives. The things she does and that surround her that make her her.

I like to imitate life, not because I don't have my own personality, but because my life could be so much more than it is, and the right fictional characters can remind you how to make things more beautiful, more loving, more enjoyable. How to be who you actually want to be, instead of wishing every now and then (or even every day in those little ways) that you did more/were more adventurous/knew more/loved more/ate more interesting food/cooked more interesting food/were nicer/had more fun/whatever! So, really, I don't want to copy Holly, I want to know how to be like her in my life.

I'm not sure how I plan to do this- after all, I just decided to make this blog this afternoon- but I know a lot of what it is I want to do. It's like a research paper, here in the form of a blog, mostly for me to have a place where I explore what I'm finding, thinking, adoring.

Whether it's making lists of the foods characters eat, or the places they visit, or the things they own- or giving each important character (or groups of characters) their own posts, describing them in excruciating detail and theorizing about what makes them tick- or even compiling multiple books' quotes to create mini-stories about life and sadness and beauty- or finding pictures, movies, songs, recipes, or projects that reflect what I think a FLB created world would look like, I think I'll find a way.

I hope that I can write in a way that's interesting, maybe even entertaining, and- most of all- helpful. I want to make my life better, looking through the lens of a Weetzie Bat world. Let's do it together.

Wednesday, February 10

Introduction

I don't remember it, but it all started with I Was a Teenage Fairy.

First of all, let's get it out of the way that I love Francesca Lia Block. I think I can honestly say that she is my absolute favorite author, and have no regrets about it.
More than any other author, I come back to her books and stories again and again and bask in the beautiful, sad, wonderful adventure of the senses that her books so commonly are.
While I only currently own 6 of her books (10 really, since Dangerous Angels has 5 of the Weetzie Bat books), I have read many more than that, as well as some of her stories, and can't wait to read her newer work.

A growing adoration of all things faerie led me to pick up I Was a Teenage Fairy when I was a young teenager, and while I didn't really fully understand it (or appreciate it), I loved it anyway. Years and years later I somehow discovered Weetzie Bat, then Witch Baby, and I fully entered the world of FL Block. Over the course of the last few years, I read, re-read, and immersed myself body and soul into anything I could find written by her. It's slow going; rescuing them all one by one from used bookstores, but there are few things as exciting as walking into the local buy/sell/trade book for the fifth time in a month, pouring over the Teen Fiction section, and finally seeing a copy of one of the books I don't have.

I love the mixtures of magic and realism. The blends of the beautiful, the horrible, the depressing, and the magnificent.

However, in all my readings and research and web-browsing for information about the Block Books, there's one thing I've never really been able to find; How to Live Like Weetzie. Or, really, how to live like any of FLBs vibrant characters.

Most of FLBs stories are fascinating combinations of realism and fantasy, but her characters almost always strive for a life full of beauty, taste, scents, sensuality, and- most of all- love and affection. Her characters live without judgment or prejudice, and thrive on so many sensual experiences (later, I'll make a list of how many times food is mentioned within Weetzie B alone) that just reading them makes you dizzy!


Now, I hope nobodies going to try to sue me, because I'm saying now that I don't own any of the Francesca Lia Block stories/books/etc, of course. If I did, I wouldn't be writing this blog. But I am, and I don't have any rights to FLBs stuff.

I write this out of a desire to do something. A need to express my own thoughts, opinions, and hopes about her works, and how I think if we all lived a little bit more like Weetzie, Witch Baby, Ruby, Tuck, and Primavera, maybe our lives - and maybe even the world- would be a little better.
A little nicer, a little more accepting, a little more delicious, a little more loving; a little more beautiful.