grey day

Without her alarm she drifts on her soft raft into the grey dreamsleep of afternoon quite content, blankets weighing her down with iron down, porcelain sky when she wakes weeping over spine-buildings and spitty streets.

Did I have a dream somewhere in my past that longed for me to be high in the heavens over an enchanted city, sitting in a third-floor window alcove on a rainy day, listening to country music and painting? It seems awfully familiar. I always have wanted to live in one of those high old apartment lofts with a window that is the face of a giant clock. They like putting these places in movies. Who knows if any exist.

"....while a 10 inch snow came down like stars in small calcium fragments..."*

That picure up there is by Hundertwasser, a mystical bearded Austrian visionary artist, who I adore, and who also painted ABSTRACT. I make this distinction, cause I am a realist and a romantic and am too crass and kitch to appreciate most abstract art (that's me being sarcastic there). Hunderwasser was one of those artists like I hope to be, with an art that spread to all the disciplines that he practised. He painted, of course, but was also a sailor, a traveller, and a designer of architecture and landscapes. The apartment buildings and factories he designed in Vienna are one of the city's biggest tourist attractions. Let's hear it for wacky public art bringing prosperity to the cities that allowed it to flourish (and here I am NOT going off on a tangent of how VITAL it is for a community to support art, and defy conformity and banality in the face it presents to the world. All people are rubes looking for a circus sideshow, and to present an interesting and delightful and sometimes frightening city to the universe is to encourage tourism and local economic growth. Oh wait, I wasn't going off on a tangent...) Here he talks about his ship, and probably quite naturally, gets on to other, bigger subjects:

"I built my ship as a house ought to be; full of life- and full of life means full of color. Grey is the color of death - and of our civilization, a civilization bearing the marks of death, a dying civilization.

I have no intention of dying with it, and that's why I became a painter."

I went to the Townes Van Zandt tribute show at 12 Galaxies the other night. On the bill (each covering 2 Townes songs and one of their own), were luminaries including my darling Pete Bernhardt, Jolie Holland, The Last of the Blacksmiths (I am listening to their album right now. It is wonderful!), Ben Chasny (6 organs of admittance) and The Court & Spark. The show was great, very informal, but each performer seemed honored to be there. None of them were old enough, or famous-in-the-folk-scene enough to have ever MET Townes (I think....), but it's incredible to see how one lone folkie's influence spreads all the way from Nashville out to this coastal city and it's collection of musicians. It probably helps that Townes is sort of a martyr, due to his early and sad death. It gives me hope though, for all of us that struggle and do our art with all of our heart in our own supposedly isolated little scenes or isolated little bedrooms. We feel like we are preaching to the choir, as our devoted friends are the only ones (again!)that show up for the show or the gallery opening, but in reality we are creating a world that spreads and touches other worlds.
For instance, the seemingly isolated Santa Cruz/ Bay Area music scene, that I grew up in (never a musician, mind you...but as an artist and musican's "wife", and dedicated show atendee) has now spread and produced underground fame and influence for quite a few of the bands I saw in someone's garage at a crazy house-show:
The Devil Makes Three
The Lowdown
IBOPA and Ten in the Swear Jar and Xiu Xiu (all Jamie's bands)
Drunkhorse
Rilo Kiley
The Shins (Mykle saw them at Crunkhouse, not me)
Comets on Fire, 6 Organs of Admitance, Whysp (all bands and projects birthed out of the wierd staff of Santa Cruz Streetlight records in the 90's)
The Velvet Teen
Little Wings
Mule Train (though they don't consider themselves as such, I am sure)

there are no doubt others that I am forgetting.
So....keep on doing, each of you. Whatever you do. Fame means nothing. Our work is bigger than that.
(so quoth the girl who woke up at 2 in the afternoon today!)

*from my favorite Ann Sexton poem that I memorized in highschool while painting in a broom closet. It's called "Us".

Illustration Friday- CAT

Oh hello, I'm a creepy cat by a gnarled tree. Can you tell that the artist doesn't actually OWN a cat, and looked at approximately NO cat pictures while drawing said feline??!! Maybe you want to see how I started out?



I scanned it just in case I blew the picture while Kai-ifying it (adding lots of scratches and pen and ink hatches).

penguins on the ice

penguins on the ice
Originally uploaded by noxious nick.

Mykle is really seeing some beautiful stuff down below.....you should look at his pictures they are breathtaking......and write him a gol-darned email already!
he's at: deadbillyAtgmailDOTcom

Literary Cannibalism

What a goddamn cop-out. Painting over a butchered Julia Margaret Cameron photograph absolutely doesn't count as painting. I do enjoy gleefully chopping up books at work though. People get all jumpy if they hear pages ripping in a bookstore. It's like if you go into a china shop with your pet bull, and the bastard starts knocking stuff over. The writing on this drawing/painting/collage says:

"she thought of her mother, clear and distinct, very small, seen through the wrong end of a telescope lying in the wreckage on yellow sand, wearing her best black suit, with a small travelling hat, surrounded by the charred remains of other people's flesh."
-Angela Carter "The Magic Toyshop"

I've got some good stuff to paint on though. My spray-painting session on the roof (where I DIDN'T get the cops called on me) went well,

and I have some lovely small relic-looking surfaces covered in shadowy spirals to work on. Maybe I should clarify: they are the shape of little houses. Some of them open, like russian icons or those milagros with the virgin inside. Spray paint stays in your fingernail beds for days. Oh, you're supposed to wear gloves? Having paint on my hands has always been a point-of-pride for me.

I made this customized banner for Jordan's blog with an illustration from a chapter heading in"the Demolished Man".

I want to make myself one like it? Should I use a chapter heading? SHould I draw it myself. I imagine I would just replace the words "moonlit nothing" in the template with a link to the image i want. RIght? Oh computer savvy friends?

Apple=Zen

If I had binoculars, I could see what websites the Tibetan Buddhist monks in the Victorian mansion next door are looking at as they use their Apple G4 ibooks at night. As I was the dishes I see the back of shaved bald heads illuminated by the glow of computer screens. They also walk around on the streep in their beautiful burgundy and saffron robes, with the telltale white umbilicus of the ubiquitous SF accessory, the ipod, coming out of their heads. Maybe they got a donation from Steve Jobs.

Tonight I hang out with the lovely Halie Johnson, Girl reporter. i am very excited!

Photo by Michelle Medina

I'm the broody one on the right. The wig is pretty awesome, I must say.

More of Michelle's photos

Rusted Brandy in a Diamond Glass

Things I saw on my ride home in the rain:

twisted wet cyprus trees rising sinuous and black into the purple sky
a flock of small brown birds
a still merry-go-round, locked and shuttered
3 moving vans
dark clouds

I have been vagabonding again, this time to Alcatraz Island (which is technically San Francisco, but feels like another magical world),

and then to a golden and warm land of woo in Happy Valley on a rainy night

, and then to the Beach Flats to a silk and black-lace apartment, and then to It's beach to write things in the sand

, and then to a broken down house for a giant spicy Indian feast, and then to Blackburn St. to a youthful talent show, and then to the Rush Inn for a debauched dance party

, and then to a land of pain....
Pain of the sickness kind I mean, not the normal SC tragedy that creeps up on me, thank goodness. I convalesed in Happy Valley in my old childhood bed (how did I ever sleep on a rock hard futon?) Made it back to San Francisco in time for work on Monday, the mundane smell of old books and the needy people looking for a quick buck (which I ain't gonna give).

I have a very full life. Public transportation is my second home.

My actual paper ticket to New Zealand came today. Which means time will now race along merrily, with me fumbling further and further behind with All The Shit I Need To Do. But every speedy second does bring me closer to He. So, OK.

How and when did this wine get splattered all over my keyboard?

Despite my increasing lack-of-brains from my wayward and misguided early 20's debauchery (Woah. I'm in my late 20's!), sometimes I still have deep thoughts. For instance, walking around in the weepy night on Dolores St., I was considering What I Have Learned from being alone these past few months. More and more I notice the theme and thread of my life has been one of romantic love. That's the factor, the choice I made when a choice was presented. It's what led me to all the big decisions I've made so far (admittedly my parents nightmare, but true), and caused most of the happiness I've felt. It's caused the extremes of tragedy and desire and pure emotion and sadness. I am a pawn of romance in some ways, a disciple of it too. I am addicted to it's boundaries, nothing feels like it can make me feel:

Once an old "boyfriend" and I were laying entwined on the floor in companionability and the mourning that always accompanied our pretty-much-illicit relationship, and he asked me what felt better: the first touch of true love or shooting heroin? A morbid question, and I probably brought it up, being the beam of sunshine that I sometimes am, but the question is an interesting one, considering the hype around the drug,and the fact that I have experienced (and had a problem with) both. I can unequivocably say that true love is an INFINITELY better rush. that's what I told him then and I mean it. So here's my anti-drug speech: Fall in love instead. You write much better poetry after it's over. Take my word for it.

Anyway: tangent!
I often wonder where I would be if I hadn't been captured by romance. This time without Mykle sort of leads me to think that I wouldn't necesarily be more productive or the ruler of the world by now, as I often surmise. I do what I can with the time I have*. My life is full of people I love and crafts and time-wasting pursuits, and creativity. Love has kept me from some things, but I wouldn't trade my experiences for the idea that maybe I would've gone to art school, and have a flourishing "career" by now . That I would be above the poverty level by now.
Without romance I probably wouldn't have been the pretty-much-constant producer of the impassioned and overblown paintings that litter my room and clog up the walls with their shellaced musical notation and gold leaf and stenciled letters and charcoal hearts and smears and documentation of all that I've loved and hated. So. No regrets, same as always.
I used to say "No Guilt" as a sort of young-girl mantra to feel powerful. Now I'm older and the past is past. I ain't livin in the constant NOWNOWNOW of teenagerhood anymore. I like to concoct this past stretching out behind me as something beautiful and ornate, filled with good things. Nothing I'm doing is part of some larger "scene" or revolution. Nothing I'm doing will be noticed or remembered in the future, but in some small way I want to make something interesting and strange and beautiful with the collection of my experiences.

In other news, it's hard to type when you are listening to Eminem.

So no regrets and no cigarettes (Mykle may have stopped smoking) and no fits or sick or stops. The days are full but the nights are long. I try to do a little nothing every day.




* This is probably a lazy artist excause. But I'm being easy on myself and counting all the stuff I've accomplished, not lingering over the children's book I didn't write.

I'm going to New Zealand!!!!

Hey You! Rent my room in San Francisco for the months of March and April! At only 600$ a month (negotiable you cheap bastard), you will not find a nicer and swankier and more comfortable master bedroom anywhere in the city. Fully furnished with artsy painted furniture (do you need a GIANT comfortable Bed for these months? Say Yes!), empty bookcases and dresser, sound sysytem (CD, Tape, and Record Player), and Illustrator's table (the kind that can tilt)!! Yes it's big. Two people normally share it in comfort and style. The flat is in the lower Haight area of SF, close to buslines 22, 7,6, 71 and the J Church and N Judah Muni lines. It is one block away from both Haight St. and Filmore, and about 4 (downhill) blocks away from Market St. My housemates are the fantastic and easy-to-love Orion Elenzil and Michelle Medina. They share a room, are Vegitarean (but don't care if you aren't), and love Art, Drinking, Mathematics, Spooky Music and the Healing Arts (Michelle is a masseuse). They are MUCH quieter than I. Please tell your cool friends and let me know: kaileahsassafras@gmail.com or MyspaceMe Miss Nocturne love, Kai

Loner chick seeks internet approval

Just cause you don't comment doesn't mean you don't care right? Right?



In other news, I now sleep with my digital camera. Unintentionally. Like, right after this picture was taken.

Beware: Rhapsody

Hey All,
I have a pretty solid feeling that my computer will bite the dust (again) soon, and so this post may be my last for a while. I came home from a lovely and comparatively mellow New Years in Santa Cruz and find the hard drive (or as I like to say "detached life-support system") is squalling and buzzing in a very uncomputerlike way.



I start this year with unpoetic thoughts of actually MAKING A LIVING in the coming year instead of scraping by on the skin of my teeth, eating one meal a day, all that normal Kai stuff. Of course the green land of New Zealand (where is Old Zealand?) beckons as well, I am going to meet Mykle there when he gets off the ice at the end of February, although in all rationality I should not go, because I have NO money and no chance to save any. What would I do if I stayed home though? Continue working 5 days a week as I do now, and pinching pennies and rationing burritos? I don't know. Opportunity knocks, I throw caution to the winds and answer. And then of course, there is my sweetheart, and a new land to explore/starve in.

On Sunday night I had the freedom of a borrowed car and the empty streets of my hometown after an ass-kicking storm had flooded everything and drove everyone indoors. I drove to the end of Seacliff and parked out on the cliff above the swollen fetid rivermouth, which in the foggy rainy night looked glistening black and beautiful. The Ocean roared and the Boardwalk was a deserted surreal shadowland of stilled ferris wheels and twisting silohuetted coaster tracks. It was so heartbreakingly beautiful to feel the rain on my face, smell that fecund ocean, the velvet wet night, everything. Every new year, new fall, birthday...all of these seeming inconsequential dates become dear to me because of this remarkable thing I have been blessed to call my life. Every milestone is the opportunity to look forward to something new, some new change. So much heartbreak and so many ghosts surround me, especially in that coastal town (that they forgot to bomb), that it feels physically intense, overwhelming,... but part of that intensity is the feeling of all of the loved ones I have, and the ornate magical life I lead and all of that other hippie shit;)

I'm just so goddamn lucky. I feel compelled to try to make resolutions, but they are always the same (eat healthier, get in shape, do more art, find a hidden extra 4 hours in the day just for you....)and I never keep them anyway. I'd like to take stock of my life and write down failures and accomplishments, but I am afraid to, because I feel like I'm keeping score. I like the mystery and worlds inside me to not be reduced to that, and instead to be reduced only to a feeling I had while standing on pounded sandstone cliffs over the ocean late at night, watching the river roar out into the blackness beside an empty amusement park, all alone. Looking up at the sky and thinking that I have lived enough. Looking out at the grey stormy horizon, blowing kisses out at the sea, and thinking I can live a little more too. That would be ok with me. I am looking forward to that.