I'm 26!!!!

I had a lovely birthday on the 26th. Thanks to everyone who made it that way. I treasure you beyond measure.


(approx. 22 years ago.....)

He's not there for he has risen

Black Wings

Take an eye for an eye
Take a tooth for a tooth
Just like they say in the Bible
Never leave a trace or forget a face
Of any man at the table
When the moon is a cold chiseled dagger
Sharp enough to draw blood from a stone
He rides through your dreams on a coach
And horses and the fence posts
In the midnight look like bones

Well they've stopped trying to hold him
With mortar, stone and chain
He broke out of every prison
Boots mount the staircase
The door is flung back open
He's not there for he has risen
He's not there for he has risen

Well he once killed a man with a guitar string
He's been seen at the table with kings
Well he once saved a baby from drowning
There are those who say beneath his coat there are wings
Some say they fear him
Others admire him
Because he steals his promise
One look in his eye
Everyone denies
Ever having met him
Ever having met him

He can turn himself into a stranger
Well they broke a lot of canes on his hide
he was born away in a cornfield
A fever beats in his head like a drum inside
Some say they fear him
Others admire him
Because he steals his promise
One look in his eye
Everyone denies
Ever having met him
Ever having met him

Tom Waits Therapy: Go home after a hard day of bad news and cold sweat, take 5 Tom Waits CDs and fill your CD carousel with them (for example in my player right now: Frank's Wild Years, Rain Dogs, Mule Variations, Real Gone and Small Change), press continuous play. Relax. The day and night and all of American History are yours.

the fate of their baby

"When I was a young man I learned not to care
Wild whiskey, confronted I often did swear
My mother and father said whiskey is a curse
But the fate of their baby is many times worse"
-Buffy St. Marie "Codine"

Trip out. There's a website dedicated to songs with lyrics about drug use. Not that anything should amaze me on the internet anymore.



except from Ann Marlowe- "How to Stop Time":

" Not for a minute can I subscribe to the popular view, encouraged by William S. Burroughs, of addiction as uncontrollable need. Still less can I take addiction as the excuse for bad behavior. No one would condone stealing or child abuse on feeling the effects of the flu, and all but the severest dope sickness is no more rigorous than a nasty flu. Unpleasant? Yes. Sufficient explanation for amoral selfishness? Scarcely. Heroin eventually made me bad-tempered and remote but it didn't make me beg, cheat or steal. Had I done these things, heroin would've been no excuse.

This is an unpopular view, Americans are eager to read addiction as a virtually uncontrollable drive."

Magnolia Grandiflora

walking home tonight from the art store I saw a strangely-shaped (tall and thin) billboard with this on it:

which I took as a direct sign from my own personal god that eveything is going to be alright and only get better as the winter progresses, as my time without Mykle progresses, as the nights get longer....
What is it about the magnolia, the fury and diffuculty of painting something so luminous , so white, so white on white, so thick and fresh yet curved and thin...
Full disclosure I have a much smaller version of this poster on my wall. It came from the diner next to the bakery I eat at...the waitress brought it to me, kindly, after I visited her to ask if I could have it when they were done.
Now I just have to find a free day in which to go see these swamp dwellers.

When I dream about San Francisco, the hills tilt and get ever-more perilous and become monumentally huge vertigo-inducing slants. Everything is vertical until I am crawling up streets, tumbling down, bloodying my fingers trying to grip curbs and not fall....
like a Thiebaud painting, exactly, except without the candy colors:




maybe I should just look at the cake paintings:

update on the weather

"I have news for you, the stag bells, winter snows, summer has gone.

Wind high and cold, the sun low, short it's course, the sea running high.

Deep red the bracken, it's shape is lost, the wild goose has raised it's accustomed cry.

Cold has seized the birds' wings, season of ice. This is my news."

Funny the things you find in your pocket, written in your handwriting. Then you realize that is was something you did at work while reading a book on Celtic verse. To be included in your journal that is bits and pieces that you didn't write, but that struck a chord in you. On the back of the slip of paper it says "Author Unknown, 9th Century."

Nothing can describe San Francisco less accurately than the above passages. We are setting records for winter heat and clear skies around here, the normal fogginess dissapearing to some other part of the world. Temperature inside my work reached 82 degrees on Thursday and Friday. I felt like a weak Victorian woman, coated in dust and must from the filthy, mildewed books people bring us,(They are always demanding money: "It's OLD, and YOU don't WANT it?!!!" Like anything old is antique and valuable.) unsteady and damp-faced from the heat. I have never worked in a ny place with air-conditioning. Bookstores cannot afford things like heating or cooling systems, so we made do by strategic fans and coats and gloves and space-heaters in the winters.

This weather makes it a bit hard to justify the knitting binge that I am on. I watch movies and work on my top secret project, finding that I can knit pretty well while my eyes are focused on something else. I am always astounded by the mind's capacity to follow a pattern while the eyes watch a plot, and attention is elsewhere. It's sort of like using a number-pad on a computer: the less I think about the placement of the numbers, the better. So far I have only knitted scarves and slippers and fingerless gloves, and armlets. I feel I need to tackle something bigger and more complex. (A sweater vest!) Michelle and I discovered the most amazing yarn store in the Castro and I went there and spent too much money on delectable cottons and wools in the most amazing delicous vivid colors. The whole store (Imagineknits) is pretty much floor to ceiling with yarns that are a spinner's work of art. As a color fiend, I was in heaven.

I have a very enjoyable life right now. Most of my time is taken up by creation of some kind or another. I got to unload the new collection of antique children's books that Black Oak recently aquired, and that was fabulous. There was the Arthur Rackham illustrated Alice in Wonderland, and a charming and painfully funny kids book from the 30's with illustrations that were photos of kittens dressed like little children and pirates. I think I have to buy it just to share it with the world.

Anyhow, I'm off to go knit in the sun. Have a good weekend, all.

another one bites the dust

My brother has a blog: The Demolished Man



A sister rejoices! Hurray! Hurrah!*

*also: that's a great name for a blog, Jordan. Especially yours.

For your computer desktop background...

New art of mine on Flickr. I uploaded photos Orion took of old paintings. Check them out, they look lovely!*

*the bottom left of this screen on the sidebar.....

Late Night Cultural Percussions

Hey all,
MUSIC: Settling down to write, trying to listen to KDVS streaming over the internet, but no "Get Smarter" on tonight, though it's usually Jordan's time. What's going on? Last time I listened it was sort of long stretches of instrumental sludge metal (he gave me that term) which isn't really up my alley, but I soldier on, because Jordan is so musically well-versed I just stick with it. He has recommended some really good stuff lately; I just finally bought Autolux- Future Perfect (and it is great, it feels like a cool teenagery album to me sometimes, but then the swirling fuzzy guitars come in really strong, and it feels experienced and heartfelt), and also love The Constantines, who he introduced me to. The latter are absolute scratchy rock n' roll, the singer sounds like he has been singing for days but can't stop because the passion is just too strong.
I remember when I gave Jordan a list of essential albums he MUST own to have good taste in music, back when he started getting interested in following music. This was pretty late-blooming for him, I think around the time he was a senior in high school. The list included some pretty solid Kai (and the world) standards, Dolittle, Aeroplane over the Sea, and Crooked Rain Crooked Rain for example, but also some strange flavors of the month for me...like The Dismemberment Plan (which he still owns and likes I think!). We've turned the tables, I constantly rediscover bands from the last 30 years to get into (The Jesus and Mary Chain are SO GODDAMN GOOD it hurts me! Oh ouch. It hurts!), and he knows about bands so new they are still playing to their friends. Jordan says they will blow up and viola...they do. Case in point: Jordan gave me Franz Ferdinand about 3 years ago. And 2 years after that they are on the cover of Spin.

FASHION: Look at this punk muslim girl from Helsinki. Oh my goodness she is so cute!

I love culture clash styles. I love street fashion (the above picture is from Helsinki Street Fashion). Sometimes just walking around San Francisco is incredibly inspiring to the point which I wish i had a camera to document how alike and different and exceptionally good everyone looks. I've started dressing more how I want to: colorfully, with striped socks over tights always and lot's of skirts and crocheted things and clashing, but in a good artistic way. I always wear slips, to keep my skirt from sticking to my tights, this amuses Maria my coworker to no end. She describes me as "dainty"!! I also love old man men's wear, a la William Difede, and I wear my alpine hat and fedora, but there ain't too many good-fitting tweedy clothes like that for me at least. Tall and thin with hips. I do like the old-fashioned high waisted pants though, inspired by the otherwise awful BBC mini-series about Victorian-era lesbian show-business that we watched last night (it's called "Tipping the Velvet"). The girls in drag in that movie have fitted suits made for them. I'll just have to become my own kickass tailor.

LIT: The problem keeping a booklist and working 5 days a week at a bookstore is that you will find books every day that you want to read and never get around to reading that list. So my list remains long. Don't feel like I am accomplishing reading. So, what's best I think is to do as Rico does. Write the book down after you read it. He has done this for years. I'd be interested to see the lists!
Books I've picked up in the last 2 days only:
"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again"- David Foster Wallace
Ok it's a bout time that i read something by him. Some of my most favorite men in the world (Mykle, Orion, Sam, Rico...etc) love love love this stuff, and since I'm man-crazy in the absence of my love, I've decided to tackle the grand genius psycho, DFW! I started with his book of essays and short stories, wimpily enough. SO far, very pleasurable, and I don't feel like I've been up for two days on meth, which is how I felt last time I tried to read him.
"The Rules of Attraction"- Brett Easton Ellis
I am apparently only reading authors with three names. Hahaha! I started this last night, and promptly fell asleep. I have never read BEE before, his materialistic capitalist soulless vampire fiction doesn't sound like a barrell full of monkeys to me, but the man I love has read eveythingthing he's written so there must be some pleasure and redeeming factor in it. Then again, Mykle recommended this book once about London Nazi skins fucking and beating people up and thought I'd like it, so who knows about his taste! (kidding sweetie, I trust your totally vile taste in most things).
"The Alienist"- Caleb Carr
A historical mystery which was reccomended by the back of a book I loved called "The Fig Eater" by Jodi Shields. A good way to find books is to look on the back of books you love and see what a happy reviewer compared it to. (Unfortunately there is this long tradition of reviews comparing EVERY book on the planet to Catcher in the Rye. If I hear "the protagonist is a Holden Caulfield of the BLANK" one more time I'm gonna spit. A quick google search reveals that Holden is in fact everyone from James Dean to Walter Mitty to Huck Finn to Hamlet to Goethes Werther to characters in Pygmalion. That was on the first three pages.) I haven't started reading this yet.
"The Djinn in the Nightengale's Eye"- A.S. Byatt
I am anticipating lovely foggy days and rainy where I will need the tapestry-like comfort of Byatt's fairytales to make me descend into another world. Too bad it's like summer around here and I am constantly over-dressed. I think I already had my Fall during July and August. I haven't started this either...

what I am currently reading is:
"All Tomorrow's Parties"- William Gibson
I'm not sure I can sufficiently describe the pleasure I get from Gibson. It is a modern, illtelectual affection coupled with a poetic love. The man writes jumbled cultural futuristic sensory-chokers with a precise, cutting zen prose style that just makes me feel more present and aware when reading it. It is science fiction, cyberpunk, i guess, but the difference is that you realize while reading it, that it is REALITY. We are living in the FUTURE and all of this far-fetched stuff does exist, you just never thought about it that way. Takes my breath away silently. Even if the plot doesn't grab you (or more likely you can't understand it), Gibson is all about the small vignettes and individual flashes of pure image that group and weave together to form his books. This one is set in San Francisco, so that's cool.

All of my posts turn slyly into book reviews.

LONLINESS: Am I on the internet so much because I am lonely? I have a multitude of wonderful friends, scattered yes, but many living here in the city with me. I live with my closest friends right now. It's wonderful and I shouldn't feel alone, right?

finally:

ART: New Obsession.....pictures of the Tower of Babel. I have the Dore version right above my drawing table, and feel really drawn to this one too, by Bruegel the Elder:

what are housemates for...

other than to take pictures of you while you are asleep?








Want to see a Halloween costume of mine?
Thanks to Orion for posting these pictures and other truly dreadful ones of me on his photo gallery. I couldn't ask for better housemates/dear friends:

painter/pugilist

I did this a long time ago and found it cause i am working with creating *something*,
a *surprise* out of old journal entries.



It says thus:

Occupation: Painter/Pugilist

Let us consider
the sweetness
and exhaustion
after the turmoil
that spilt out of me in waves
crashing over the dirty floorboards of my little room
i am now painted
with the aftermath of my real work
the only work there is
literally and figuratively.
my back is brittle and sore
my hands look like splatted bruised rainbows
there is a single line of phalo blue
swiped under the hollow of my left eye
and here's the rest of me
with my rags and swabs and brushes
a prize-fighter
who took home the belt.

and then after it it has this little sketch:




Ruling!

* a pugilist is an old name for a boxer. From the Latin "pugil".

Your Art History Prof. Speaks!

A rainy night in San Francisco
funny- by the sound of the cars passing by on the street i knew that the rain had started,
even though when i arrived here it was clear.

A strange thing about inspiration-
often my ideas and urges to create overlap.
All day I wanted to write, an inspiration that I almost never recieve-
and so i wanted to honor that and see what came out-
I sat down after dinner with my disused "serious" journal
(as opposed to my "bits" journal which is mostly other people's words which inspire me)
and wrote a bit- about the mix tape I was listening to...and what i read into the lyrics
and just let myself float into writing without thought or plan or narrative...
and then almost against my will I put my book down,
walked into my bedroom and started picking up and cleaning fantasizing about
deconstructing and reconstructing some of my clothing,
trying to embroider on velvet for patches ,
and went to the point of dragging out my sewing machine when I realized I had stopped writing.

Sometimes I feel that I am a vessel for these whims.
It could be a disconcertingly religous thought:
one a bit too close to the idea of being a "vessel for the word of a God",
and inspiration being the divine fire that it is your duty to obey.
I don't believe in God,
so I would describe these whims, these inspirations, these itching fingers,
this ceasless puttering and creating that I do without (often) thought or deliberation,
as a communication with some other part of myself,
a higher and more pure part maybe,
an unconscious or subconscious part that lies deep next to the core of who i really am,
as a person,
as an individual animal.

I don't know.
I like this unknowing too.
Almost makes me feel spiritual sometimes:)

I got an amazing Taschen book from work, "Alchemy & Mysticism: The Hermetic Museum", which is a thick little thing, and just about impossible to put in the scanner, but as we all know, old engraving and minitures that illustrated alchemical texts are strange and intense and compelling in this wierd way. They are totally surreal and indescipherable and often perverse-seeming. I like these ones though they are more simple than most of the stuff in the book, the concentric circle is one that I return to again and again in my artwork. The first is from Robert Fludd (circa 1617), for whom the divine act of creation was a concrete visible process. He illustrated this in a series of engravings, all circular. He thought that our planet was such a "vale of tears" because it had emerged by this process from the "sludge of creation where the devil dwells":




This is part of a large series of engravings circa 1718, which detail how to make "Lapis Philosophorum" or a "Philosopher's Stone" (of Harry Potter fame. hahaha.) a healing material with all of it's elements in perfect harmony.



BUT, as a tie in first place for my favorite mystical illustrators are Hildegard Von Bingen (introduced to me by my father, who likes to put on her musical compositions on Sunday mornings), who was, to understate, no slouch. Talk about being constantly in the thrall of the divine spirit of creativity. Read about her
Here. You'll be glad you did. Here is her highly abstract and beautiful vision of the universe:



Tied with Hildy is Hieronymus Bosch:



This concludes the art history section of this blog! There will be a test on Friday, open notes, 10 AM sharp! hahaha.

A cool thing...

Here's a heartwarming little one that reminds me of my mouse:


my mouse is unfortunately gone because of the computer crash (i made her when i was playing around with illustrator), but she also had a fish tale. She was juggling bubbles.

the above image is from this very cool site: THE SEMAPHORE ALPHABET