Sometime in the midst of that torrential downpour mid-last week, short-lived, but intense, we lost the three-inch bud on the cutting. It wasn’t likely to last, but the effort of that portion of the plant, cut too early, to reproduce, is impressive. It’s something like the reverse of remembered limb syndrome…Here the amputated part may “remember” the whole body of the plant. Or the cutting is so full of the life-force regardless of its connection to the mother plant that it stretches forward, no matter what.
Blanca blooms in the midst of whatever’s going on in our life. Last week I estimated she’d bloom tonight, Thursday, and I considered transporting her to a friend’s dinner in Noyac, or of inviting that dinner party to transplant itself around Blanca in Bay Point. But the bud was lengthening more rapidly. I thought she might bloom on Wednesday when the kids would be visiting. How lovely, I thought, for them to see it. But it’s a late night kind of affair, and these are little ones, ages 4, 7 and 9…Would she captivate them? What appears like rapid blooming to adults may be just a slow, boring expanse of white to a child up too late past her bedtime. Those questions weren’t to be answered as the bud was growing at slightly more than one inch per day. She would bloom not on Thursday for the dinner party, nor on Wednesday for the nieces and nephew’s visit, but she would bloom on Tuesday, for the writing students.
This summer’s writing workshop is titled “The Single Effect”, what Edgar Allen Poe meant by calling for every element of a short story to contribute to the “single effect” of the work on the reader. Here was Blanca, pouring her heart out into this one single flower that remained on the plant just now. Every effort of her soaking up water and nutrients would spread into that glorious flower that would open on the night of our third class meeting. So a last minute pizza- and- wine supper was hastily arranged. “It’s like a birth,” said one. We sat around the table with our slices chatting excitedly, then we’d step outside, wine glasses in hand, where Blanca would be quietly dilating. It was a cool evening, the moon a waning gibbous, one singular white orb in the sky pulling at one white flower on the deck, in singular harmony, and the students like petals around the center.
I LOVE the idea of taking Blanca to a dinner party! And I laughed out loud to having the guests assemble around her!
Just as we might curtsey upon meeting the Queen, no? Last year a guest last year described the blooming event as “soul making”… Hope you might time your next visit with Blanca’s next blooming!
If I had a microphone sensitive enough to record the sound of a flower opening, I would ….meanwhile I imagine an aria, Ave Maria perhaps?
State regulators are expected to vote Thursday on a petition asking them to require porn industry performers to use condoms and to take other safety measures. The six-member California Division of Occupational Safety and Health standards board appears likely to create an advisory committee to report back on whether the law should be changed and how it could be accomplished.
The board, appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, has up to six months to act on a Dec. 17, 2009 petition filed by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation that seeks to change state law to require safe-sex protections for adult-film workers, including mandatory condom use and more stringent safety training and testing for sexually transmitted diseases.
Earlier this month, staff members recommended that the board create an advisory committee to consider amending the law “in order to give greater protection to employees in the adult film industry.”
“It’s to study the issue more. If it merits it, they would formulate the language and bring it before the board,” to amend the law, said CAL/OSHA spokeswoman Erika Monterroza.
Officials from the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation said they support the creation of such a committee, which they hope would ultimately back new regulations for the adult film industry. The advocacy group has been pushing regulators and porn industry leaders to better safeguard the health of adult-film performers since an HIV outbreak among porn performers in the San Fernando Valley in 2004.
“Allowing the porn industry to flout the law on technicalities undermines the whole concept of worker safety in California,” said AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein, who is among those scheduled to address the board Thursday. “By making it more explicit it removes an excuse the industry has used that these regulations are not intended for their industry. At the end of the day, it’s about enforcement.”
Last summer, the foundation sued Los Angeles County after the disclosure that an adult-film performer had tested positive for HIV. In the suit, it alleged public health officials failed to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and to enforce laws requiring employers to protect workers against exposure to bodily fluids.
The suit was dismissed by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge late last year, but Weinstein said the foundation appealed the decision last week.
Among those scheduled to speak Thursday is former porn actor Darren James, who tested HIV-positive during a 2004 outbreak.
“I know there’s a lot of actors that’s getting tired of STDs,” James said Wednesday in an interview with The Times. He said many actors feel they cannot speak out against the spread of STDs for fear of losing work. “They just need more options; if they can provide them with better care maybe we can slow it down.”
Also scheduled to speak at the meeting are half a dozen representatives of the adult film industry, including Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, a Canoga Park-based trade association.
Duke said her group’s members have tried to comply with state health and safety regulations, but that they are overly vague and general. She supports forming an advisory committee as long as it includes adult-film workers, producers or other industry representatives.
“We have been trying to work within the regulations, but it’s almost impossible,” Duke said. “If we were going with the letter of the law, every film would have performers in latex gloves and goggles.”
BEIRUT -- Deadly sectarian street battles again engulfed Lebanon's northern coastal city of Tripoli on Saturday as supporters and opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad clashed in fierce gunfights in the country's latest Syria-linked unrest.
The heavy fighting, including cross-neighborhood machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks, revived fears that Syria’s increasingly bloody rebellion could be spilling into neighboring Lebanon, with its complex mix of rival sects and its own history of civil strife.
By the early evening, Lebanon's official National News Agency reported at least 10 people had been killed and more than two dozen wounded, marking Saturday’s battles as among the most deadly Syria-related fighting in Lebanon since the Syrian rebellion broke out more than a year ago.
Underlying the gun battles are bitter sectarian divisions between two rival neighborhoods — on one side is Bab al-Tabbaneh, a largely Sunni Muslim area where anti-Assad sentiment is strong, and next door is Jabal Mohsen district, a pro-Assad stronghold. Jabal Mohsen is home to many adherents of the Shiite-offshoot Alawite sect, whose members also include Assad and much of his security leadership.
Gunfire broke out around midnight Friday and continued sporadically through the night, only to intensify on Saturday, authorities said.
The latest fighting in Tripoli has stoked further alarm over heightening sectarian tensions in this volatile Mediterranean country. Lebanon has close political and social links to Syria.
Among the victims reported Saturday were a mother and her son who died in sniper fire in Bab al-Tabbaneh.
The official Lebanese news agency reported that “rocket bombs” could be heard every 10 minutes on Saturday afternoon and that snipers were targeting civilians at two roundabouts and along the international highway. A police contingent sent in to deploy between the two rival districts "was pinned down" due to the heavy fighting and snipers, and unable to advance, said the news agency.
The two neighborhoods have long-standing rivalries that date back to the Lebanese civil war and have fought on numerous occasions in the past. But tensions have risen considerably and clashes have intensified since the revolt broke out in Syria in March 2011.
In May, lethal street battles erupted between the neighborhoods, leaving 11 dead and wounding more than 100, according to the Daily Star, a Beirut-based English-language daily.
Tripoli has a dominant Sunni population who generally support the revolt in Syria against the government of Assad. The major exception is Jabal Mohsen, the Alawite enclave involved in the latest fighting.
The fighting in Tripoli reflects how the conflict in Syria has jolted Lebanon's delicately balanced political-sectarian landscape. Expressing support for Assad from Lebanon is the heavily armed Shiite movement Hezbollah, along with some other factions, while most Sunni movements want to see the Syrian president ousted.