kai and ob hill

kai and ob hill, originally uploaded by sandwichgirl.

every once in a while , Antarctica comes back to haunt my thoughts......

between

plum blossom, originally uploaded by kai smart.

I work between the epidermis and the fat. I can't see this layer, I will never know it. It is as thin as a slip of cardboard.
I can feel it and I am learning when the machine is there, how it sounds, the way it moves.

I can't face vibration anymore other than at work. Holding on to the coffee grinder makes my wrists buzz with exquisite pain.

I am edging towards the darker side of things. Maybe this is a sign of Fall, my favorite season. The Season where everything always changes.

On the radio

ashland, or, originally uploaded by dirtpath.

I was lucky enough to be the guest DJ on my brother Jordan Mitchell's radio show yesterday. He's got a 2 and one half hour slot on KDVS, Davis, CA on Wednesdays. His show is called Music for a Porch Life, and is consistently excellent.
If you missed it (ha ha) you can download the stream here, and have it on your computer FOREVER, to listen to at your whim!

MUSIC FOR A PORCH LIFE

I've never been on the radio in a musical capacity before. I won a poetry contest (actually, a couple) at the end of highschool, and had to read my winning poem on the radio (my poem contained the word "cocksuckers" so I had to change it, so I replaced the offensive word with the less offensive and completely ridiculous "carrotsuckers") but since then I haven't really had any experince.

I approached the show like I was making a giant mix tape, and then it became second nature for me. First Nature. I made a list of all the songs that I love that I thought fit into the constraints of my brother's show; "Dark bars, dusty roads, murder ballads and songs about trains".
Then we prepped the show in a listening station the night before, fitting the songs together by tempo and subject matter and feel. Just like making a mix tape back in the old days, where you actually had to LISTEN TO THE WHOLE SONG before you put the next on on. (Not like making CD mix where you don't have to listen to any music while throwing it together).
My take on Music for a Porch Life is more feminine, and has more echo and buzz than twang. Mazzy Star, Concrete Blonde, Jason Molina.....and more of the most melancholy bittersweet beautiful songs ever.

" A love song is never simply happy.
It must first embrace the potential for pain.
Those songs that speak of love without having within their lines an ache or sigh are not love songs at all but rather they are hate songs disguised as love songs and they are not to be trusted."


-Nick Cave
"the Secret Life of the Love Song"
Please enjoy!

You do not have to be good

Mykle and I were talking about his rather extraordinary view of evil, which is; that Evil does not exist.
Maybe the view is not so extraordinary as it is unordinary, anyhow-
It's always interesting to be with such a strong and different personality such as he.
Our conversation reminded me of one of my favorite poems, which hung above our bed for years:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


-Mary Oliver
"Wild Geese"



I have been sitting on the floor framing pictures from one of my enduring obsessions, "The Garden of Earthy Delights" by Hieronymous Bosch. I want to someday go to Madrid to see it in the Prado. One of my favorite parts of it is the painting on the outside doors of it (for it is a sectional triptych that opens), which I first saw on the inside of an album ("Clouds") by Joni Mitchell (my first musical love).
I think obsessions choose you. They keep appearing and you cant ignore them after a while.
I once crashed a party where there was a big wood-sectioned reproduction of The Garden of Earthy Delights on the mantle, triptych with hinges and all. I have never wanted to steal anything so bad. (Except maybe the "Life- sized" carved wooden unicorn skull at 5 & Diamond in San Francisco!) The triptych was cleverly guarded by a candelabra with actual candles though, and I left empty handed. It would have been pretty ironic to steal it anyway.

I love the internet sometimes. A search for that unicorn skull led to this. Go to Ben Shaffer's website to look at his other stuff, which is psychadelic talismanic shrapnel.


His website Ben Shaffer

My website also pops on the first page of the image search for "wood unicorn skull". And this is BEFORE this post is published. Ha ha.

Literature, Women, and Tattoos

My favorite magazine is The Believer, a quirky and smart grab-bag publication that I finally just subscribed to. I had been buying each issue at the newsstand for a while, which is fine, but I love the excitement of getting something in the mail, so I upped my chances by buying something that will show up each month! Ha ha.

Perusing the excellent Believer website (you can read it online too, if you are into that sort of thing) I found an excellent and interesting article and would like to recommend it:

A BLANK HUMAN CANVAS
THE LITERARY TATTOO LEAPS FROM THE PAGE TO LIVING PARCHMENT

It's exactly the kind of thing that I enjoy reading: tattoos and book reviews. I marked a couple titles mentioned for my reading list, and even skipped a couple paragraphs of the article to preserve plot twists and secrets!It talks a lot about text tattoos, and if you like that sort of thing (I got one this week! It says "Art." Sort of.) you will like this flickr group:

Body Type (a Flickr pool)

This evening Mykle and I had a conversation about which san-serif fonts we like, since we are both serif people (I like Impact, he likes Ariel Black). I'm sure there could be psychological profiles made comparing these two very different groups of people; the serifs and sans-serifs. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Flowers in December

Do you like Dracula?
Mist?
1970's witchcraft?
hotels with Lynchian red corridors?
carriage rides at night?
the amazing beauty of Hope Sandoval?
The music of Mazzy Star?


if so, this video is for you:

Why I am tattooed

The natural journey into self-discovery that comes with age and experience has, for me, been a journey into redefining myself into my perfect vision of my inner self. I am a tattooed lady.

I first got a tattoo at age 18, told no one, and continued to be tattooed throughout my late teens and early 20s. I want to investigate how this happened to me, and in my work I often get into telling the story of my first tattoo and it's reasons, sharing with my client, in order to bond (though not consciously). Being tattooed was always a pretty personal experience for me.

I brought no friends along, I told no one, I asked no one's opinion of what I should get, it was exemplary of what I experience now as a tattoo artist. Often people bring friends with them, and often MANY friends. I have been surrounded by crowds of 5, of 8, of 10 even, and though most tattoo artists would not tolerate this kind of atmosphere, I do, since my power of concentration is strong.
In all my tattooing though, I would go to the shop solo, be ignored by the guys working behind the counter, and peruse the portfolios with an unforgiving eye.
I looked for a steady line, an artistic talent that extended beyond tattoo flash, basically someone who would not alter my ideas in any way. I misused amazing artists, looking back. Both Doug Love and Holly Ellis were forced by me to do an other artist's work, pure outline and sculpted line, however beautiful, I disregarded their own natural talent. I could not help it though. My artistic heroes had died fifty to one hundred years before, and I wanted to be emblazoned with the work of these dead men who had made me into an artist at the youngest age that I could remember.

With each tattoo I have felt more myself. For some, tattooing is a work of metamorphosis, of forgetting your old self and forging a new life, of commemoration of the self as a parent, of rebirth in some way. I have always felt that I was an illustrated person on the inside, and the more intricate and colorful I became the more I felt comfortable in my skin. My tattoos are not governed by fads, and in this way I am outside a large part of the tattooed culture in America. I don't say this as a way to feel superior, it's just a fact. I have always had my own gentle, ornate vision of beautiful tattoos, and have felt driven to decorate myself and others in this style. I do not look down on the time-tested trends and uniquely American styles of tattooing. I simply have my own vision. This is why I wanted to become a tattoo artist.

I saw many many tattoos in the magazines that my (much much older and un-tattooed) friend Douglas would give me at the new-age spa I went to in high school. The issues were mostly "Skin & Ink", or "Tattoo". I hated just about everything in them, then, but I scoured every issue. When I finally was old enough to get a tattoo, I went for something small that would soon become trendy- the kanji for "love". I have now met many other people with this tattoo, and have even given it to a few people myself. At the time, it was a reminder for me, to believe in love ( my boyfriend had just cheated on me with my best friend and I was feeling the kind of all-consuming hate that only teenagers can feel). I don't regret this tattoo, and even though I have been tempted to cover it sometimes, I still like it. All my tattoos are about love, which is the force that drives my life and my every decision. I have been obsessed with the icon of the heart, and have proceeded to get tattoos with heart-forms in them. I group my first tattoo with these others.



I also attribute my affection for tattoos to the fact that I have always looked very "girl-next-door" and sweet. Non-threatening. My old housemate used to say that I reminded him of the book "Sarah: Plain and Tall". I think the tattoos have been for me a way to challenge people's knee-jerk definition of me. I do not get them to make people think that I am "tough", if fact, I will be the first to say that I am not. I can handle pain, but I do not think I am special in this aspect. Rather, I am the safe white girl that no one would glance at twice. I challenge this notion with my tattoos. Not with my persona, or the way I act, rather- my tattoos uphold my belief that we must fight against taking people at face value, and judging them on their appearance. No matter how normal a person looks, they have a story and they have had pain and darkness in their life. Adversely, no matter how gnarly and frightening a person looks, they have a gentle and childlike side to them. This I truly believe. I want to redefine people's perception of the tattooed person as beinga criminal or deviant. Some tattoo artists and people in the community value this label, but I do not. Human beings have always been decorated animals.


(Bosnian girl with orthodox Christian hand tattoos)

I am a decorator, in the purest and least banal sense of the word. I decorate everything in my life, and often think of my possessions as articles encrusted with layers of self like layers of coral. This now also goes for my skin. My enduring inspirations will be writ upon it. I don't think I will ever be the tattoo collector that truly seeks out an artist and commissions a piece of artwork. I still have the vision of myself as the complete tattooed lady, and this still involves those long- dead people of the past. I will be complete only in a way that only I can fathom. I will never be a full-coverage girl (as many of my friends tell me I will be). I am too astheticaly exacting to haphazardly cover every inch of me with pictures. I truly believe in the fone and flattering placement of tattoos, and I hope I can stick to it, to be a better billboard for my own work.



No, I never get sick of them. You get accustomed to your own skin when it is a depiction of your soul in some sense. Or, if it's not perfect, you ignore it, as people do with scars or freckles or whatever they hate every day do. I encounter this every day.

Tattoos for tomorrow (no, I'm serious):

A cat portrait
A cupcake with the word "Mom" written in frosting
A princess "crown" with a halo



To each their own......................