Plan A

Drinking Kalimocho from a wineglass she stops and ponders exactly what she is doing here.....oh yes writing my Plans down to mark them in time. I stayed up very very late worrying and worrying about summer and what it would entail: there are two weddings involving very good friends of mine scheduled for this summer, and then there is the tour I have been invited to go on with The Devil Makes Three. If I went for the whole time on that tour (two months-across the whole USA--jesus I want to travel so bad!) I would miss both weddings and have to quit my job. You cannot be on tour in some podunk town selling t-shirts for a bluegrass band AND be at a wedding in Santa Cruz. Jus' can't work. So I have decided to limit my touring massivley, attempt to keep my job, and go to both weddings. Sort of a make-everyone-happy plan. SO I go on tour for like 24 days and then fly back in the nick of time to see JJ and Renee get hitched. A month later I see Rose and Tom jump over the broom handle.
The End
(what a boring blog! but thats ok since it is just for me!)

I REALLY WANT THIS ALBUM! HOW AMAZING MUST IT BE????

New Obsession Rears Ugly Head

Just what I need- yet -just what I want:

a small gallery of dimestore fantasy novels

The Principle is something I find romantic....the artists: long lost or badly credited on the cheap books which were produced at some dusty publishing house in the midwest circa 1975. Some artists possibly succumbed to obscurity and some probably live in Ben Lomond! (hahaha) These are the books that populated the houses I grew up in: dark forest households with long-haired moms reeking of pot-smoke and growing potato plants in jelly jars on the kitchen windowsill. Small boys playing Dungeons and Dragons in striped rugby shirts and spiderman BVDs, the dads barbequing and getting drunk (Foster's tallboys and Michelob) outside on the redwood deck, dogs chewing on spit-soaked raquetballs and biting. Me in a corner, terrified of attracting attention, reading "the Singing Stones" (god how I wish I could find that book) and wishing I was a Princess on a misty Irish moor-secret passageway to the Land of Magic peircing the fog in front of me.
The Unicorn Girls are made, not born.

i don't know what's wrong with that link. I'm gonna make things real hard for you and make you copy and paste this whole address...sigh...but seriously it is so worth it. Spooky folks especially will like it.

www.visioluxus.com

In other news it is a rainy night in San Francisco. Feels like it's rainin' all over the world etc. My eyes are tired because I am working on a new VERY small series of pictures of pretty girls-little portraits for QUICK SALE! I'm paying myself 40$ an hour! They all have frames that I paint and decorate too...do you want to see one? OF COURSE YOU DO! Here's a neried:

Aimee-if you ever read this-THIS IS FOR YOU. It is an amazing website with gorgeous photos of weeds and long-haired girls. Michelle (the queen of cool artist links and brilliant taste) showed it to me:
visioluxus
Please enjoy.

Everyone should read

...the Polyphonic Spree by Nick Hornby. It might have been just extra specially good for ME because I am reminded by it that normal, super-witty, English guys read and have a reading future ahead of them and write about it and are NORMAL,.... instead of being slightly gross-smelling old bum-dudes with lots of money who buy books on Nazis and "the German Military" (aka NAZIS) and who unfortunately hang out at the bookstore I work in. Black Oak Books of Darkness. I had exponentially more conversations about books and what to read and how I felt about the Da Vinci Code when I worked in new bookstores. People who want used books aren't browsing for the next book to kick their ass, generally,...they are looking for books by Anton Lavay (bukowski/henry miller/hunter s./robert anton wilson/studly-man-counterculture guru-who-recently-offed-himself) in the first edition (like we would let that get past us!).
I'm sure this is all immensely fascinating.
Guess which website by a former Logos employee rules? Janina's does. It has a diary with beautiful camera-phone pictures (who woulda thunk it?). And her small-press books are available through it.

Walking on the beach today, I happened upon a large conference of birds standing upon the sand , aparently discussing something, since they were hesitant to move even when a small child in a red coat ran up to them and shouted, briefly, like bark. At the middle were pelicans, about three or four of them, then surrounding in white were gulls, mixed with plovers and sandpipers that ran around a little bit, but didn' t leave the group to run in the waves like you would expect.
I stood for a while and watched them, kicking my feet in the sand and tying down my hair with a silk scarf, since it was windy. They were still there when I lost interest-or rather started thinking about what amazing creatures sandollars were-and wandered off.

Ever since reading Dream of 1000 Cats I sometimes think the animals plot things.

Last night I drank amaretto at The Crepe Place in Santa Cruz, admired the pressed tin ceiling painted red, and ate part of a crispy fried Tunisian donut with Graham, Summer, and Jen. It was a brief after-show dessert, and we talked mainly about seahorses (Jen says they are like unicorns-and i agree completely. What fantastic creatures to actually exist! They are like shells themselves, or a fossil preserved flat in a rock, except they live, and swim upright, and have spiral tails and ridges and beady eyes and snouts! Goddamn!


As I get older I only get more in awe of things. All the drama and hormones of the teenage years and the tumult of experimantation and love and distress are stripping away and I feel a "child-like" (harhar) wonder that pervades most aspects of my life. I don't know if this is what they mean by maturity. Is sort of think not. It is the maturation of a sensualist possibly. But it's not egotistical sensuality. It is appreciation of the simplest things, which are not so simple at all.

toe

...also reminiscent about Woodman's photos: the china flats. I wore those shoes exclusively, when I was a little girl. The ones with the roses embroidered on the toe.

hauntings

I blame Summer Pierre for getting me all hooked and obsessed with this photographer Francesca Woodman:

The images in her work are so haunting and inexplicable, yet they remind me of my own childhood (women and girls with long hair and flowy cotton flower-print dresses in dilapidated houses...you know, hippie-kid-growing-up-rural stuff). The feeling I get from looking at them is diconcerting. It is as if something that explains what is happening is always just off frame.

Also incredibly sad and creepy is that this young artist killed herself at age 22 by "trying to fly" out a window (wow, a cat just started yowling outside the window and scared me!).Though I don't want to join the cult of celebrity suicide... this feels pertinent to me now, 2 women I knew killed themselves in the last 6 months and both in the same desperate way: hanging. It is beyond everything I could ever understand. It seems to me to be extra frightening because it is such an act of violence to the one you should love most: yourself.

literati

I'm addicted to Orion's reading blog- which I still check daily even though we live together and I see him reading the books he talks about:

orion reads

He is a great writer and always amusing.
In the spirit of he~ my incredibly abreviated list:
1. Chiva-nonfiction about the heroin trades' impact on a small Mexican town
2. Wind-up Bird Chronicles-cause i guess i'm crazy for not liking Murakami at first cause he wrote too much about ironing his shirts (loaned by Sam).
3. The Pacific-I'm already reading this collection of stories by Mark Helprin. It is lovely- although Helprin speaks for the Rich. He makes them seem human, and have emotions like us!
4. A Thread of Grace-almost done with this new one by Mary Doria Russell. It is about WWII, and although it is a bit self-serving (Russell is of Italian heritage and converted to Judaism, and the novel is about Italians who ran sort of an underground railroad for Jews during the Nazi occupation....you see I wish I didn't know this) I like it. I must look at the art and read the literature of this time period to even get an inkling of a sense about what this war was like and how it formed history (I took a class at UCSC that was art history of the WWII period in Germany and it was the first time I grokked WAR...a terrifying yet illuminating experience). I'm terribly interested in that era (even when I was little I loved the books West By Night, The Diary of a Young Girl, The Giver, and my favorite The Devil's Arithmetic which are all about the Holocaust)...it seems like it could NEVER happen now.....but then I forget we are at war. Constantly. Then I get pissed for forgetting and fretting about not going dancing enough and not having enough money. Trivia. Minutae.
5. Tess- from the Richard Lange reading list- which I should post. It is so rad.
6. The Dispossesed- Anarchy in Space! (after Mykle and Orion are done)

weekend news

our weekend in santa cruz was misty and cold.
the rigg st. barbeque went well, with folks throwing knives at a plywood target and clustering around the cue that is made out of an old oil can for warmth and roasting meat and eating hot potato salad and apple-pecan salad and drinking beer. i drank Shaw and Red Grapefruit juice--a spontaneous concoction i call "rubine widdershins" for no reason other than i like how the words sound.
we stayed at rigg st., slept on the couch, and were annoyed out of our minds as the drunken revelers came home from the rush inn at 2:30 am or so and decided to burn stuff in the back yard and put on music. my just desserts-since how many million times was i among those that stumble home drunk, wake up the house, try to destroy something and pass out in a stained, oily bed? i deserved to be kept away and writhing (I was getting sick) more than any other. drinking that whole bottle of wine didn't help either.

from the embroidery book:

The heavy heart

lit-nerd-ature

Found today at work while shelving endless books on semiotics, symbiosis, judaica, nanotechnology, and byzantine art:
-a black hardback book on the UNICORN- lots of renaissance engravings that I plan to use for silkscreen tshirts.
-could it be a $10 Taschen Verlag Man Ray book of photos of Kiki de Monparnasse and other volumptuous sloe-eyed beauties from fin-de-siecle France (I spelled that French wrong sorry)? Yes it could!
-King Ink by Nick Cave. Hardback, First edition. (I get this feeling in my loins that I just don't know how to explain....his HANDWRITING is reproduced in there! It is enchanting!)
-a book on embroidery from 1959: "a needle is a woman's traditional instrument of self-expression..." (yikes) -which i may scan some images from because the pictures are rad. I will use it towards fullfilling my dream of making my own crazy quilt, which i have had for quite a while.

All of a sudden it is night- and the window still open, smells of barbeque from the courtyard below coming in with the warm dark air- going to Santa Cruz tomorrow and taking the coast down. Maybe there will be time for a picnic!

fog and beanbags

I'd like to record this as officially the first day where I look out the kitchen window (where normally a panoramic city skyline exists) and see only white. The San Francisco fog is in, and could spring/summer/amorphous California good-weather be far behind?

Last night I was locked out of the apartment and after languishing in the dark on my own doorstep/chillin in the urban knitter shop with the 27 dollar yarn, I discovered what I took at first to be a bag for some kind of huge industrial project, being as it was lying on the sidewalk on Page st. next to a tractor. Oh no, it is a GIANT BEANBAG, and Orion and I fortified ourselves with bracing cocktails and walked it on 4 wobbly legs up the hill and up 3 flights of stairs to our flat. I think we looked rather like some strange anime beast, as it completely obscured the top halfs of our bodies when we carried it.
It now takes up approx. 1/3 of our living room with its squishyness.

essentials

new musical obsession: British Sea Power.
continuing musical obsession: Milla Jovovich.
strange victorian mad artist who painted strange and genteel cats (just discovered): Louis Wain.
fairy-tale palace: the conservatory of flowers in GG park.
habit (trying to keep): letter-writing and puppet-making.
habit (trying to rid): $6 cocktails and piles of clothes on the floor.
new thing of god-like worship: pale green and dark shiny purple striped and spotted orchid in a wire cage.
omnipresent asthetically-pleasing scene (printed on rugs and blankets from Mexico): dogs playing cards and smoking cigars on a green felt table.
favorite scent: basil perfume from "demeter" company.
new website stuff just up: www.kaismart.com.
project not-yet started: crocheting a newsboy cap of peacock-colored wool (knit glovelets finished last week).
new hobby: picnic-ing. but i need a proper basket with gingham-checked inside and a place to hold wine-glasses.
dreams: disturbing.
reality: wonderful.

scandal!

i dreamt i kissed paul french