my girls

The Elven Princess

Against my better judgement i share this letter i wrote (o.k., it's an email) back when i was soooo emo it hurt (of course). I just love the way it is written. This is one of the high points in my flowery writing career (discovered this today in the "drafts" section of my email. i edited the names out...i have SOME discretion!).

"How I Have Been

The elven princess has been her same ol fucked up self, kissing boys then saying she did not, walking on a moonlit beach at three in the morning afetr nick cave (swoon), wrapped in a wool blanket and feeling her heart blossoming pain and confusion in her throat.
She has been wishing she was unwanted by all but herself, since that's the only person she is good at being true to.
***** is in love with her and so is *****. She loves them both in different ways, but not enough to be with either right now.She hurts someone each times she moves. Hearts break when she twists her spine.
snap snap snap
she is tired of hurting people who only want to love her and make love to her and have her love shining on them and enfolding them as she knows it can enfold: completely, but loosely. Like an aura or a soul. She does not want to withhold this love from anyone who asks for it. She is loose like her love. She drinks the want of her like sweet wine. She knows that she possibly doesn't deserve it, and that makes her want it more while it lasts.
She is waiting for the moment when they realize that she is an evil bitch and ditch her once and for all.
Nothing can happen. The moon is stuck on pause. Her breath is frozen. Her hair has turned the color of madrone. Her heart is a gasping child, measuring breaths by the ticks of a non-exisistant clock affixed to an invisible bomb. There is only silence where her heart was.
It is waiting for the detonation.
Love, Kai"

So yes, things are better now, though less epic and romantic and tortured. This is the time in my life during which I lost like, 10 pounds because I was too sad to eat. Those times are gone gone gone.

Before we die

we absolutely have to see the Northern Lights, and get married and live in a treehouse and paint a mural on every wall and donate all of our fortunes to charity and get backpiece tattoos and go to vienna and stay in a houseboat and knit a sweater and make my own shoes and work in a cottage industry and silkscreen a clothing line and learn to play fiddle and banjo and write copious amounts of letters and drink really good coffee and see the sun go down over many nations and hug strangers and cry and do portraits on the streets and learn to tattoo and go to Cornwall and ride motorcycles around the British isles but today I'm just going to lay here on the couch and not ever get up until it is night.

my new painting and i

i did this with no thought or idea. the girl is smoking a cigarette and hugging a sock monkey.

in addition to the rose castle

I forgot to add that the childrens playground looked especially like fairytaleland because of the giant gold shut-down carosel. duh, kai.

hmmmm.....

i swear this isn't going to become a: what I saw on my bike-ride home from work journal!

and i haven't even had a glass of wine yet

Here's a glass of wine for the moon, rising over the John Muir Elementary school into the lavender evening sky. Here's a glass of wine for knitting in the round on rosewood kneedles, for the acting greatness that is Al Pacino, for the way the kid's playground at Golden Gate park looked like a fairytale castle-scape:rough-hewn grey-pink stone building with rosettes and medieval windows surrounded by pastel web jungle gym and emerald green muddy lawn. In the distance trees, receding into darkness where clusters of figures in ground-sweeping coats gather, ring bells, make mysterious deals, smoke and push around 24 packs of Budweiser in baby strollers. Here's a glass of wine for the lover that I get to share this world with, for the smell of eucalyptus and wet mud in the panhandle, for the gold-encrusted spire of city hall that is now lit with floodlights, to the yelling people in the street below, to making puppet-show animation until 4 in the morning.

This is the color of the sky RIGHT NOW.

all on a summer's day

human kindness

Almost everything in life is pleasurable because everything is new. The city is a complex organism of smells and souls and grey grey weather. It seems funny to me that people live here on purpose, until I remind myself that I am living here by choice as well.
Sometimes it seems to me that people live in the city because they believe in the goodness of the human soul and want to be around other humans like them. Why else would you move here? I moved here to see the art that people turn their trash into. Cynics live in the country, in the solitude of things that are not like themselves. The country people always talk about the cold, souless invisibility that city-dwellers experience, the meaness of the people around them. I sure as hell felt that when I first got here, but now my opinions have changed (probably caus I left the apartment!). People are flawed and sweet and polite and shy everywhere. I have encountered tons of kindness and respect here, and under much more extreme circumstances than you would ever face in the country or small town.

Made some tarts

vanquished by ancient texts!

Little did i know that books illustrated by my sacred triumverate of artists :Aurthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, and Kay Neilsen (with Aubrey Beardsley and Harry Clarke hot on their tails) are haute property in the antiquarian book world, but it appears that to even show your face at a dusty book convention you need a white vellum gilt-embossed tome of one of these three. Mykle and I walked in pouring rain through the slightly industrial wasteland south of Market to go to the Antiquarian Book Convention today. We arrived dripping wet and happy and I wiggled our way in for free. I can't even express the amazing books we saw there- booksellers from all over the globe were represented, each with a little booth holding millions of dollars worth of products which would take only about an hour to burn to ash. Ancient maps in Latin, medival miniatures painted and gold-leafed by hand, enourmous original white vellum folios of Peter Pan illusrtated by Rackham and tied with a white satin ribbon, Sylvia Plath's copy of her first book published signed to Ted's parents, First-edition signed copies of everyone you can imagine: Hemingway, Joyce, Tolkien, Bukowski (with drawing), Steinbeck, Miller, etc etc. The kids books were amazing, as I said, mainly bound in white vellum embossed in gold, uncut pages with the rough deckle edge-a thin sheet of tissue covering each illustration. We got to touch things too, wet and rumpled as we were, everyone was super nice, if tweedy and upper class-seeming. I found Black Oak's booth and talked to Carl, my manager. Carl shows me a Visa receipt for $3,500 that someone had dropped on books at one time. This is the duty of the artist and the writer: to give the very rich something to spend their money on, so they will been considered to have good taste!
I decided long ago to become the next Dulac, and bring childrens book illustration to an epoch of glory only rivalled by those men at the turn of the century whose books are being sold right now in a warehouse in San Francisco for $500 a pop!!! Wish me luck in this task! I am first illusrating the Aimee Messer story entitled "The Jar", then on to my own interpretation of my favorite fairy tale: East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

i love my absence of hair!!

sleepy

Orion says "napping" like it's a special imported dessert which he must enunciate so I'll know exactly what deliciousness he indulged in. It's charming. And this is what I have been indulging in: staying home in our little flat in the sky, knitting while sitting companionably in the living room, the three of us, discussing yarn and music and how to kill kobolds or whatever in some computer game which I know nil about. Last night I painted and read poetry and ate leftover greasy fried fish and we laughed and talked till late. This is how you save money while living in a place where you have to pay to walk around and breath the air.
Luckily, my commute by bike is free and also saves my country-girl soul. Thank Goodness.....

chopped!

folly

I chopped all of my hair off. Like, ALL of it. It feels very freeing and my hair feels soft and silky like animal fur. I'm really into this making of drastic superficial changes to my person on the spur of the moment and then just dealing with it (arm tattoos anyone?). It keeps things interesting and helps me pretend I'm changing. And maybe i am. I'm not feeling too vain or in need of male attention these days. I like just being frumpy and comfortable. Since I moved to the city I am more into function than style.
Lucia did the chopping for free in the Rigg St. kitchen. It is a rad haircut, better than from a salon, as I can never communicate with the fashion creatures armed with spray bottles that populate those places. It's like when I (in my greasy-hair and rags) went to Marcy's (horrors!: I had a gift certificate) and had to communicate with the living mannequins at the M.A.C. makeup thingy-place. These girls were so shellaced in every possible kind of makeup they looked like male transvestites. They towered over even the overgrown Kai, in high heels with rhinestone ankle-straps...their glass-bright lipgloss reflecting the flourescent lights like a diadem (!). One had a dark orange tan and a purple streak-job. It actually looked sort of punk in a Boy George sort of way.

Also now I can buy gel and have a mohawk!

June Vs. Anais: Your vote!

the arched eyebrows of a Brooklyn girl

vs. the lace of a spanish dancer

Tonight, Today

testing one two three
do you hear me radio internetland?
Today I rode my bike in the soft green morning of the San Francisco panhandle. Tonight I walked down Clement and smelled the overwhelming salty odor of Korean barbeque streaming out from the brightly lit restaurant windows. We are home now, up the dark green dingy stairway smelling of rat-pee and marajuana, and Mykle is making "big stew", a savory combonation of lots of leftovers from the fridge...bacon, beer etc. Our home is so welcoming, high above the city, the roccocco-encrusted spire of city hall shines all gold and black from our bedroom window.
Tonight, after 2 whiskeys, I became entranced with the people on the 22 Fillmore bus. Evryone wore black or denim and looked studiously away from anyone else. It's nerve-wracking for me to try to do that, to not be interested in what everyone else looks like, smells like, what they are reading especially. I am always getting caught looking people full in the face. I think, "I could make dolls of each and every one of these people and have them dance together." I am amazed by children who get on the bus, sans parents. The city does not seem like a place to raise kids, but I'm slowly realizing that it is just another environment, albeit one with less trees and more people. More sirens. More Indian food places smelling of saffron and curry.

Today I discovered something wonderful: you can walk to the Arboretum (spelled wrong I think) during my lunch break, and sit on the emerald grass in a bowl of lawn and lean against a cyprus tree and feel the powdery golden sunlight and watch dear little Chinese kids in hand-knitted jumpers run barefoot in the sun. When kids are running down a hill they all make the same sound, no matter what language they naturally speak.

No really

i dont give a rats ass