Tipis and Roadtrips

OK, it's five bucks for a half an hour so I'll have to be a super-sum-er-upper. Firtly, thanks to all of you who left comments. I miss y'all too, and wish I could've packed you in my luggage with me (I was carrying enough stuff) and you could be here now IN PARADISE with me.
Imagine Santa Cruz on a perfect summer day. Now add a bit of humidity and no morning fog. Not a cloud in the brilliant blue sky, supreme silence, and only the smell of sweet flowers and grass and the sea and sometimes a comforting smell of sheep to divert your mind from such pleasures as: what kind of fresh fruit will I have with my yoghurt today? And, Is it wrong that I am suddenly catapulted into the land of the summer-friend-sushieating-luscious-roadtrip-adventure? I haven't come from the slavery-filled snowy wasteland of Antarcica!
We drove with fantastic and amazing Antarcticans Jesse, Sandwich, Lisa, and Trevor up to this Northern tip of the South Island: Takaka, or Golden Bay (look it up!). We are staying IN A TIPI at a place called SHAMBHALA which is a tropical hillside garden backpacker hippie-village filled with mosaics and composting toilets above a pristine beach. I keep thinking the normal Talking Heads-inspired questions: How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house?! This is not my beautiful WIFE!!?? Antarcticans are swarming into this town to see a show by Antarctican "Toofless Sean" who is playing tonight at some roadhouse called "The Mussel Inn". Whew. Evryone is very cool, and somewhat amazingly-sensitive to my plight of being the only person around here not flush with money who speaks in acronyms. I am in the land of the traveller, the kind of person I often wish I was if I didn't have such a fixation on HOME and Steady Jobs, and stuff like that. Folks are going to Thailand and Papua New Guinea, and biking around South Island, and going to Russia and China and South America. I'm like: "Yay! I got outta the bookstore!"
ANyhow, I think of you all and do really wish I had the money to write you all seperate emails. Please don't take this blogging-only thing as a message that I don't wish I could talk to each you individually. Much love from the groovy sheep-filled paradise. I'm going to go jump in the ocean and braid shells and flowers in my hair. Wait, no hair. Scratch that.

Perfection and Majesty

We are in some strange kind of paradise, a little bit of a combination between tropics (weird plants) and Scottish Highlands (rolling hills and sheep), and Yvoire or some other blindingly picturesque town of small buildings with climbing vines and fish N' chips shops and doorways that the giant Kai cannot fit through and doorknobs that come up to her knees. It is called Akaroa.
We stayed illicitly at a campground over the hill in Okains Bay (which helps if you are a lazy lowbagger with no reservations who are driving around in the dark up and down giant precipitous rolling hills of majesty), and then stayed there for reals the next night (like, we payed). Everything is very well-equipped around here, campgrounds and trails have huts to stay in which are often very swanky. We are well equipped too, our van in small, and being in the back feels like being in a fort made from couch cushions. We have some little stoves, and coffee, and our zip-together sleeping bags on a matress in the back. NO I have not yet driven. It is very perilous and windy, and we have been driving almost exclusively on narrow "tourist drives" that run along the very top of giant hills. Everything is breathtaking, including the drop over the edge on each side. I really really hope the brakes hold out. Hah.
It seems like we will be taking a boat cruise on the Bay today (we are on Banks Penninsula-look it up) for too much money, and then going back to Christchurch to pick up some wacky ice folks tomorrow. Later on we will be getting very burly (Mykle)/tired (Kai) by doing a bunch of tramping. It's not like it sounds. It means a long backpacking hike. Wish me luck. As we all know, I am more made for lying languidly around on a chaise lounge, knitting and smoking opium and teaching my parrot French. Just kidding. When pressed, my youth of slogging up and down mountains and through swamps with my outdoorsy family pays off and I realise I have amazing stamina, even if I have no muscle.
I hope you are all well. Do something lazy for me.
love love love

I'm far away now. Weee!

So, news flash, it is summer in New Zealand. Muggy, wonderful with tropical flower-smells drifting through the air and soft grass, and all that. Dry hills. I mean, I knew it was THE END of summer, but the freezing San Francisco wetness before I left made me pack scarves and wooly gloves and many layers.
Everyone here is from the ice. Or, maybe I shoul say, The Ice, and everywhere we go there are more people who have just flown in and are wearing shorts and seeing the night for the first time in 6 months. They all seem sweet and happy so far and of course Mykle and I, as a social couple, have been doing a lot of Hanging Out. Everyone I meet is flush with having money and a flexible ticket and it seems the future is open before them. They are going to Burma and Cambodia and Russia and biking around New Zealand, and the possibilities are endless (something I only pretend to know anything about).
It is beautiful and I feel like I am on some kind of vacation. We went to an AMAZING bar last night with a view of an industrial-docked bay off the balcony, and green hills beyond and an incredible decorating style that involved red-quilted walls, stools made out of rebar, lamps made out of dollheads and lit-up headless mannequins. Basically, my paradise. Except for; drinks are expensive.
The people are very friendly and not too concerned with our presence. Maybe living in a beautiful climate like this makes you laid back and happy- like Santa Cruz except for the pissed-off localism I have all too frequently indulged in. One of the bad things about growing up in a tourist-town is that when YOU are a tourist in a tourist town (I rather think that NZ is a tourist ISLAND) you feel horribly self-conscious. I try to fight this feeling, but sometimes it creeps in.

It's wonderful to see Mykle by the way. I feel like he was never gone. It's like he took a crash course in this kind of language called "Antarctican" and now has long conversations that I don't understand, but I don't sense any gap in time. Two ends of time are neatly tied, strangely. You were right Michelle, there was a small symphony orchestra playing when I saw him after getting off the long long plane-ride (not as hellish as I thought it would be because I slept), but the instruments were baggage carts and screaming wee children, and escalator noise. AND there he was, dressed exactly as he had been at the airport in October(and every day of our relationship), not really smiling, with facial hair EXACTLY like Wolverine, and I saw him and it was Good.

*waves hanky*

So here it is darlings- In an hour I leave for the airport, with 4 heavy bags and one light heart. I have been rushing to get most things finished all week, but have been made sane and kept happy by the amount of people who have been calling to wish me good luck, or insisting that they MUST see me before I go. You know who you all are, and you mean the world to me.
Funny enough, leaving preparations involved two things: packing and illustrations. I got the illos done (of course in the nick of time, but fully) and the packing...weeeell, my lovely subletter, Carrie, is letting me leave my 200 tons of books and shoes under the bed, and Mykle's random peices of iron and mechanic tools and electrical cords.
Have I mentioned lately how much I love San Francisco? It's freezing and raining, and supposedly snowing in Oakland, but the sun shines through the clouds silver and oh! it's so beautiful. I look to the South and see the future on the grey horizon.

Solitude

When left to my own devices,
i see each small task accomplished,
as a little step closer
to feeling as a whole person does.

It's as if I acquire things, collect actions like trinkets,
my work is a hatch-mark on a wall,
marking off points in an unfathomable game.
Sometimes there is nothings so pleasurable
as completing some relatively meaningless chore
that only my solitude and the chilly afternoon
lets me accomplish.

With the presence of love around
small tasks like this get pushed to the side like broken cluttered toys,
and only love is taken up in the hands
smoothed, polished, cared for...
all else in wayside trash until I notice it at random
between the other work of love,
and time spent in each other's presence,
and experiences acquired together.
That too is a kind of gain, but one of the heart, immaterial comparatively,
but all consuming.

Solitude is a blessing I guess.
Love and the presence of it built my world,
but now I see how sturdily my world stands up when the braces, the scaffording, the physicality of love is taken away.
Here I am in my solitude-
in my practical tower-
hard at my work.

This isn't a poem, it's actually how I write naturally when I am writing something only I will read. Hooray for blogs, where you get to pull out your journal and copy this stuff, cause it's the only way to explain that makes sense. This kind of stuff is shorthand, written longhand.

Procrastination is the key to happiness.

My two favorite grafittis right now:

"I've got the solution- do nothing!"
(which is sort of like the icon that I made for LJ:

)

and "Eat Shit & Bark at Mankind"
(which is scratched into the sidewalk at the Chrurch/Duboce train stop. I think it's funny cause it turns the normal mean-spirited "Eat shit and die" into a riff about the habits of dogs.)

*speaking of LJ icons*
I just want to show this one (which I use as my main one) to my mother:

Look how cute (it's my grandma as a little girl)!

Free for all!!

Anyone can now comment on my stuff. Even if you don't have a blogger account. So feel free, unless you are a robot.

Illustration Friday-Simple

This is simple to explain. It's a self-portrait. Just me in my high-backed chair, absorbed in my strange craft, on my own planet. Sepia ink (oh how I love it) on bristol.

Revival

People shook and threw their hands skyward, sweat-slicked rhaposodasical. The dirty bar heaved toward two gangly amazinglytall cowboys on the front of the stage, shit, there was no stage- down on the floor with all the good people - the black clad cowboys forming a singing tag-team duo of brotherly love. Preaching sin and preaching redemption, downing ice-packed tin bucketsfull of beer and a green bottle of scotch- man, did they drink fast!- Slim and Munly, Munly and Slim worked the crowd into a cathartic frenzy that was reminiscent of a good old fashioned-Tent Revival.
Did I mention that I was standing- um-no- Dancing a mere foot and a half away from Munly the entire time?!!!
I'm not sure the last time I saw such an amazing show. Orion has warned me that perhaps I am already obsessed, but hell, I need this kind of thing in my life. Good shows. People in San Francisco that actually dance.

I'm an athiest kid raised with faith only in the force of nature, bred on the death and chaos and rebirth that I saw in the mountains around me, but I think I vaguely understand the intense feelings and baggage that people from a strict religous upbringing carry. Their Christ is bloody, and nature is bloody. I can understand it. The Christian god seems to be an uncaring god, just like nature. A brutal god. To the people that worship it, oh, I mean Him, .....it seems to be worth it. There's a passion that can only come from that kind of brutality, that kind of high rejoice can only come from that kind of hellish depth. The music that this band plays is of the highly religous type, but religious in the sense that it comes from a Christian place, and talks about man's struggles with demons he might not believe in. There is also perversity, and weird humor and good helping of punk rock. So that's good.

Since you've all been so patient here's a song by the band I've been talking about- Slim Cessna's Auto Club, called "Hold my Head". Enjoy and brace yerself cause it's nine minutes long. I also have more pictures nof the show on Flickr.

Literoticas Maximus

Shelving Literature is an excercise in restraint, as my list of books to read grew by four today after I finished putting away two carts of books. The list is kept in my little book, in my purse, and NEVER refered to when I need something to read. I am like a literary magpie, always wanting fresh new paper and a cover I've never seen before, not some book I've seen a million times that is set in Venice, or "that captures muggy memories of the deep South"*, or "a poignant look at the disillusionment of today's modern search for love"**, or some such nonsence. I had an eerie experience today when I picked up a book I had never seen, called "The Pearl Diver", was intrigued by review comments on the back (I always grow interested in books that are called "spare" or "achingly beautiful" or "razor-sharp... cuts right to the bone". Often these books are sad. Go figure.) and was able to guess EXACTLY how the book was going to start (with the meditative decsription of a methodical preparation for pearl diving, which shows off the auothor's years of research...i.e.,"She ate her steaming green bowl of seaweed soup...etc, etc"*). I grow jaded and easily let down.
A while ago Halie said she wanted to look at my reading list, so here goes. (Beware! I read, and have been known to deeply love, Fantasy) (if they have a k, I read them, or started to and then discarded them in a fit of disgust):

1. The Alienist by Carr k
2. Outlander series by Gabaldon k (all the men in this book are always getting erections. No wonder Romance Monthly reviewed it!)
3.Wild Decembers by O'Brien k
4. Transit of Venus by Hazzard k (amazingly written, but not good for 10 minute intervals on MUNI)
5. Laborador by Harrison k
6.Tower of Babel, Angels and Insects k (my current book), Matisse stories by Byatt
7.My Dream of You- by Nuala O'Faolin (doesn't she have a wonderful name??)
8. The Disspossesed by LeGuin
9. Fingersmith by Waters k
10. Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Lessing
11. Cook's Tour by Bourdain k
12. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera k (Unbearable is right!)
13. The Kite Runner by Hosseini
14. Running in the Family by Ondaatje (speaking of blurbs making you respond, my favorite blurb in on the Vintage cover of one of my top five books; "The English Patient" by Ondaatje. It says, simply; "A rare and spellbinding web of dreams". Not bad for a book about a bomb-difusser in love with a French nurse.)
15. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
16. 100 Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez
17. Atonement by McEwan (I read "The Cement Garden" in one sitting. The man is brilliant)
18. The Etched City by K.J. Bishop (a blurb on this book compared it to an Aubrey Beardsley drawing, so, duh, I bought it. it's nouveau-fantasy)
19. The Complete Claudine by Colette k (french lesbian schoolgirl hijinks sometimes grow wearying after 3 books in a row. I suggest breaking them up)
20. Wide Sargasso Sea by Rhys
21. A Memberof the Wedding by McCullers
22. The Reader by Schlink
23. A Scanner Darkly by Dick k
24. The Diviners by Laurence
25. The Magic Toyshop by Carter k (this book rules)
TODAY'S ADDITIONS
26. Ingrid Caven by Schuhl
27. Anything by Henning Mankell (Swedish mysteries that my manger says should be in the genre of "Soft-Boiled" instead of "Hard-Boiled"!!)
28. Stay by Griffith (Mystery by poetic fantasy author)
29. The Flanders Panel by Perez-Reverte (art history mystery by sexy Spaniard)

because i can never go to bed early

Summer tagged me for a questionare thingy. Tagged means it's like a chain letter, and it spreads throughout the internet like a virus/healing source of community power. It also means I have to ask 4 other people to answer the same questions. So, like, i don't know anyone who has a blog who's not Summer or a surly bastard (Mykle and Jordan and Paul! Oh My.), so I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna answer the questions in a most annoying way:

Google Image Search!!!


4 Jobs I've had:


Grocery Clerk



Painter



4 Movies I could watch over and over:



Olivier Olivier



The City of Lost children



4 Places I've Lived:






San Francisco
ummm...that's it


4 TV shows (no image search for this dumb topic):

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Carnival
Angel
Dr. Who



4 Places I've vacationed:

Canada
Italy





4 of my Favorite dishes:



Green Curry


Arizmendi Pizza



(sorry. this picture came up when I typed "burrito")


4 sites I visit daily:
Hot Design
Russian Children's Books
Crafty Bead Lady who loves clashing even more than I
Hipsters Behaving Badly

(If you want to see what I really look at daily, look down on the left there)


4 Places I'd rather be:





That Round House

a nothing little update

I wish there was a cursive font on this thing.

Days of depature are rapidly approaching, making me think there's nothing like having travel in your future. It's a feeling of an impending SOMETHING that makes all the rest of life seem acutely sweet. Here's my new flyer for Jordan's dance night on Sunday, which I HOPE I will be able to go to.



Ooooh I just love drawing hipsters kissing. It's done with pen and ink wash on the lovely watercolor paper that saved my life (for an artist, I have NO paper. A lot of my work is done on computer paper, which bleeds) when Rico gave it to me for my birthday.

rainy night house

I am living the life of my dreams.