Lisa - ProfilesArchive

About Me

+ clear green water, tulip poplars, gerbera daisies, sepia photographs, Japan, creeks, holding things in my hands, oldness, the sound of Portuguese, clean lines, muted colors, pomegranates, Mountain Dew in a can, Havana, country roads, country wisdom, turns of phrase, hot sunshine, children on their birthdays, serendipity, ancestors, Polaroid pictures, Sapelo Island, sliced ruby-red tomatoes sprinkled with salt, blackberries, slow winks, slow grins, New Orleans, scuppernongs, the long curve of an inner thigh, the warm heft of a woman's breasts, the warmth held in the hollow of a neck, a warm palm in the small of my back, the taste of salt on a collarbone, learning.

My Interests

Art, Design, Gardening, Genealogy, History, Language, Literature, Photography, Travel.And ... a certain mauricienne.

I'd like to meet:

Those who make me laugh, make me better, turn me on, turn me out.

Music:

Right now: Alice Smith, Madeleine Peyroux, old faves like Etta James and Rickie Lee Jones.Always: Albita, Fiona Apple, Aquanote, Susana Baca, Mary J. Blige, Cesaria Evora, Chocolate Genius, Beth Gibbons, David Ryan Harris, Van Hunt, Incognito, Etta James, Chaka Khan, Kina, k.d. lang, Aimee Mann, Masters at Work, Thelonious Monk, Me'Shell Ndege'ocello, Osunlade, Res, Jimmy Scott, Cassandra Wilson, Stevie Wonder, Lizz Wright.

Movies:

La Tropical, Flag Wars, The Execution of Wanda Jean, Born Into Brothels, Nobody Knows, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Nothing But a Man, George Washington, Life and Debt, Black Orpheus, White Balloon, City of God, Paris Is Burning, Ma Vie en Rose, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Television:

True crime; "Top Chef"; "Project Runway"; football.

Books:

Truman Capote, Charles Dickens, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Jonathan Franzen, Melissa Fay Greene, Edward P. Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Andrea Levy, Sinclair Lewis, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, Donna Tartt, Paul Theroux, William Trevor, Jack Vance, Olympia Vernon.

Heroes:

Hattie Henderson Ricks (and her youngest son) and Margaret Colvert Allen (and her second daughter).

My Blog

My whole world turns.

In the warmth of a Johannesburg January evening, poolside, at a long table heaped with bottles of wine and the fruits of the braai, I look up into the inky sky and: Orion. The first constellatio...
Posted by Lisa on Wed, 07 Feb 2007 08:40:00 PST

Keeping it real, on another tip.

Posted on a museum door in Stone Town, a General Notice to Visitors: About Street Love: AVOID MOUTH-KISSING EACH OTHER IN PUBLIC. This is quaint and cute and charming, but consider this: in 200...
Posted by Lisa on Mon, 05 Feb 2007 01:01:00 PST

Keeping it real, Zanzibar-style.

In a tiny, dim shop in a Stone Town alley, my eyes dropped down the overstuffed shelves, alert for clean graphics and color I could work into my general drab schemes. Ah, an olive-green teeshirt...
Posted by Lisa on Mon, 05 Feb 2007 12:02:00 PST

Journey to the bottom side.

Tomorrow we leave for a long-awaited vacation in South Africa and Zanzibar. I'm like a kid at Christmas before any trip, and this one has me geeked beyond bearing. It'll be my first voyage...
Posted by Lisa on Thu, 18 Jan 2007 10:53:00 PST

"One Night Only." (Thank the lawd.)

I try to support my people's cinematic endeavors, but really. Did anybody actually like "Dreamgirls"? I knew the thing was a musical, but I guess I wasn't expecting it to be so ... well .....
Posted by Lisa on Wed, 17 Jan 2007 08:16:00 PST

Can the pieces make do for the whole?

"This place of the unrepresentable, the unknowable, and, in the language of Toni Morrison, the 'unspeakable,' is where the slave lives. It is where a slave woman named D...
Posted by Lisa on Sun, 14 Jan 2007 01:59:00 PST

My New Yorker arrived today.

I have a stack of these magazines unread, but I skimmed this one before throwing it on the pile. I am not ordinarily a poetry fan, and this poem does not appeal in its entirety, but these l...
Posted by Lisa on Thu, 11 Jan 2007 04:40:00 PST

In a rambling mood. (Thanks, 'Kwase.)

I was cleaning off my unruly desk this morning, and I unearthed a notepad with scribblings I made while listening to an artists' panel last year. This is what Torkwase Dyson said: "Th...
Posted by Lisa on Wed, 10 Jan 2007 07:13:00 PST

And just what the hell is next...?

A week or so ago, I walked into the optical shop. The clerk pulled my chart, then hollered across the room, "So, you gon get them bifocals now?" I flinched like I'd been scalded, and she b...
Posted by Lisa on Wed, 10 Jan 2007 05:09:00 PST

One's "unwritten biography".

Q. How do you feel about your own skin? A. I like it. It is my unwritten biography. My skin reminds me that I'm a 53-year-old woman who has smiled and furrowed her brow and, on occasion, worked in the...
Posted by Lisa on Tue, 09 Jan 2007 07:27:00 PST