mawage, a dweam within a dweam

Look at the wedding I was a bridesmaid in (mentioned in post below)! My longest friend got married to her honey of 7 years! Joy! Pictures taken by Mykle, king of sweetness and light.
Rosey and Tom got married

Illustration Friday

Reflection

King Kajota is a fairy tale that is in one of my favorite books "The Green Fairy Book" edited by Andrew Lang. In the tale, the king tries to drink out of a stone well, but his beard hangs into the water and the demon king who lives at the bottom grabs it and makes him promise him all sorts of ungodly things. This is my much basterdized version of it. Orion and Mykle say that the kid looking in the well looks like he's happily asleep and dreaming. He's probably happy because he doesn't have a beard! And because he's wearing a dress.
This kind of "reflection" is about looking in the mirror and seeing some totally distorted and monsterous version of yourself. I've been there, you've been there, we all have. You don't recognize yourself, but it's you all the same.

Old Picture and memory

There's this little falling apart cabin made of salvaged boards and stained-glass windows on the mountain above Aimee's house. It's a typical dark hippie ruin: mice in the drawer if the desk, no plumbing, a little rickety porch that overlooks a clearing thick with chapparel. The redwoods and oaks swallow and darken the cabin itself, though, and the matress in the loft is torn and damply soft. The interior is decorated with some abalone shells, many candles and candle holders, and old bottles that cluster around a broken sink. There is the arching belly of a mossy oak that sticks into the living room, and detritus of the roaming 80's kids: Thrasher magazines, beer cans, and scraps of salvaged carpet.
You climb an almost vertical forest path to get there. Aimee's parents built it & lived there when her older brother was a baby, toting water and food up the hill with the remarkable aplomb and idealistic sincerity of the young back-to-the-landers in the 1960's.
Years later it was re-discovered by the barefoot longhaired dryads that Aimee, Zina, and I were in highschool. We'd sleep over in the cabin on the ruined matress, lit by only by candles on the floor, drink wine, and work ourselves efortlessly into our own dreamy outrageous hilarity...nights lasting forever, epic and golden and instantly historical. We were woken in the fogged mornings by the tree branches dripping through the hole in the wall next to the torn bed. Sometimes we'd bring our boyfiends and all get it on in our own seperate corners of the little place. Mice would keep us awake, rattling in the candle-holders and scampering (we called the movements of the mice "skibbling") across the floor.
Years later, during The Sad Days, I stayed at Aimee's house again (I was living out of my car at the time, and feeling rootless and embroiled in a hell of my own design). We journeyed up the cabin one day and found deer bones, forget-me-nots, and enlarged holes in the walls of the place. I was intensly skinny, due to being too sad to, and wearing a beaded dress from my obliterating night before at the bar with jeans thrown on underneath. Hence, this photo...taken in one of the cabins many stained glass windows:

Illustration Friday

WISDOM

After drawing this I realized that I think that books can help make you wise, but real wisdom comes from experience. I probably was just wanting to draw a princess, same as when I was 5. Haha. What changes, eh? The books part is easy to figure out, since I spend 30+ hours a week surrounded by them, selling them, unpacking them, cleaning them, buying them, flipping through them, alphabetizing them, and sometimes reading them.
Right now I'm reading: Bankok 8 by John Burdett. It is really good: fast-paced, exotic, and lurid, but with heart.

Oh Well!

I did this gorgeous piece of artwork (yay me!) for the cover of the album by Garrett. Funny thing was, I knew the whole time I was painting it (acrylic on paper) that it was totally not what he was looking for. However, I continued at it. I was drawn by some compulsion I cannot name, to finish it and show it to him, even though he wants a picture like my old work (the moody darn and destructive stuff I did when I was sad--the time in my life where sadness rules me which I will now on refer to as The Sad Times).

Now I don't know what to do with it. He did see it, and he said briefly, "cute", and then put it down. I think I shall paint out the words and have it say "Kai Smart" and then in the talk bubble, "The Sad Times" or "The End of Whanton Whimsy" or something like that. The future title of my future gothic country album, basically. hahaha.

In the realms of music, I know a lot of really damn talented musicians. We just got the second compilation --billed "the deviant twang sampler"--that has been put together by Paul Davis. It has tracks by Mule Train and The Devil Makes Three and Meg Woodruff and The Younger Brothers and.....judging by how totally fantastic the first one was, Sunday Coming Round should be excellent. To buy it go to Warning Sign Records. Paul makes all the art and handscreens everything, I might add.

Birthday paint

MINIATURE PAINTING

I just finished this little tiny rendition of my magnolia paintings for my coworker Maria for her birthday, which is tomorrow, same as Jordan's. The size is about 3 by 5. That's in inches. The color didn't come through that well. It is more turquoise in the background than that dull blue. But oh! the magesty of the scanner! Instant gratification!
i came to the city
and lived like old Crusoe
on an island of noise
in a cobblestone sea....
That's what the background writing says. Joni Mitchell, if anyone was wondering. It just sort of popped into my head today, because I was thinking of living in this city, and being made joyous and revulsed by it every single day. I've been reading Summer's blog and she just moved to scary Brooklyn and is going through a lot of the fears and joys I first had *and still have* since i moved here. The lyrics pertain to how I see things:
And the beaches were concrete and the stars paid a light bill and the blossoms hung false in their store-window trees....
In other news:
My parents just bought a plot of land in a rural Canadian suburb (!) so now we will have somewhere to run to when this whole shithouse (aka America) goes up in flames.
hah.
Reading: a scary large novel called "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova (a NEW book! wow!) on 1970's historians' search for the ancient Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tempes, or whatever you call him. It's ok, engrossing at least and seemingly translated from some other language, which gives the writing a precise beauty. I'll have to check on which language if any it's translated from. I remove the jackets when reading books "borrowed" from work, so I don't muss them.
I just finished an even scarier book about Mormon fundamenalists by John Krakauer called "Under the Banner of Heaven". I've always been a sympathetic athiest, I think, with even a bit of religon-envy (because of all the passionate art that has been inspired by religion) at times, with a general belief that relgion is a tool- like drugs or therapy- and can be a helpful or a very dangerous thing. Mostly the latter, not the former...but this book left me with a very bad taste in my mouth. People are pretty amazing when it comes to the stuff they will believe. Faith is something maybe i won't ever understand fully...then again,........ as I said to Mykle at dinner tonight,"I don't believe in mystical stuff or esoteric stuff except for dreams that tell the future and worlds beyond this one that exist on the same plane, and magical love hexes, and faerys, and unicorns."

The Wedding

The bride wore a vibrant green silk halter dress (the color of these letters) with roses in her hair so red that they were velvety black. It was a brilliant hot day at Quail Hollow ranch, the ceremony was under an arbor in the field (horses snorting in the nearby corrall), a slate stone underfoot in the shape of a heart.

Rosey married Tom and Tom married Rosey. My oldest (as in: longest known) friend and her sweetheart of 7 years "got hitched" (as they termed it due to their Old Western/Spanish themed wedding) and it was as lovely as you could have hoped for of a ceremony of two so perfectly and exceptionally matched. I try to explain: Rosey and Tom are the most exquisite and stylish people I know. Rosey is very short with a dancer's build, with latte-colored skin and glossy black ringlets (due to her Spanish/Yugoslavian roots) and Tom is very tall and skinny, with a chiseled face, gentle and humorous brown eyes, and a neat goatee. They plan to have babies in the future and I just don't know if the world is ready for the combination of these two. They collect antique tins and Pin-Ups and vinyl records of every sort and WW2 memorabilia and vintage clothes, which they both wear constantly and look impeccable in.
Their wedding matched this unique stylish vintage spirit they have: the bouquets were of greenish-white roses, eggplant-colored miniture calla lillies, and red roses; Tom wore an amazing vintage cowboy suit in black, with white piping and a black cowboy hat; each guest got to take home a horseshoe to bring luck to their house; the tables that were arranged under the oak trees had flea-market 40's print floral cloth covering them, and each was named for a different ghost town. Needless to say, all of my artistic sensibilities were sated. The whole wedding party square-danced to the amazing all-woman old-timey band The Stairwell Sisters and ate 3 different kinds of meat.

I was a bridesmaid, and having never been in a wedding before, this was a very good one to start with. We (there were 6 of us) got to wear 40's style vintage-looking black n' white Mexican print skirts of a flattering cut. The skirts matched and we had matching black fans (which came in handy because it was so damn hot) and white roses in our hair. We rode into the ceremony in a horse drawn carriage. Aimee, Zina, and I got to walk down the aisle together, in a nod by the bride and groom to our sisterhood, which was very sweet and comforting besides (Zina had stage fright and I must admit I felt some too). Rosey and Tom laughed and fed each other wine and blackberries and fresh-baked bread as part of the ceremony and it was lovely and I almost cried but I was laughing too much.

P.S.
I caught the bouquet, through no want of my own to do so. Mykle was genially pissed and grumbled at me because of the teasing, but I thought he looked so good in his vintage 3-piece wool suit and super-short haircut that I didn't get mad. Haha. My sweetheart also took photos of the ceremony. Soon we will have a gallery I hope so everyone can see.