between

plum blossom, originally uploaded by kai smart.

I work between the epidermis and the fat. I can't see this layer, I will never know it. It is as thin as a slip of cardboard.
I can feel it and I am learning when the machine is there, how it sounds, the way it moves.

I can't face vibration anymore other than at work. Holding on to the coffee grinder makes my wrists buzz with exquisite pain.

I am edging towards the darker side of things. Maybe this is a sign of Fall, my favorite season. The Season where everything always changes.

On the radio

ashland, or, originally uploaded by dirtpath.

I was lucky enough to be the guest DJ on my brother Jordan Mitchell's radio show yesterday. He's got a 2 and one half hour slot on KDVS, Davis, CA on Wednesdays. His show is called Music for a Porch Life, and is consistently excellent.
If you missed it (ha ha) you can download the stream here, and have it on your computer FOREVER, to listen to at your whim!

MUSIC FOR A PORCH LIFE

I've never been on the radio in a musical capacity before. I won a poetry contest (actually, a couple) at the end of highschool, and had to read my winning poem on the radio (my poem contained the word "cocksuckers" so I had to change it, so I replaced the offensive word with the less offensive and completely ridiculous "carrotsuckers") but since then I haven't really had any experince.

I approached the show like I was making a giant mix tape, and then it became second nature for me. First Nature. I made a list of all the songs that I love that I thought fit into the constraints of my brother's show; "Dark bars, dusty roads, murder ballads and songs about trains".
Then we prepped the show in a listening station the night before, fitting the songs together by tempo and subject matter and feel. Just like making a mix tape back in the old days, where you actually had to LISTEN TO THE WHOLE SONG before you put the next on on. (Not like making CD mix where you don't have to listen to any music while throwing it together).
My take on Music for a Porch Life is more feminine, and has more echo and buzz than twang. Mazzy Star, Concrete Blonde, Jason Molina.....and more of the most melancholy bittersweet beautiful songs ever.

" A love song is never simply happy.
It must first embrace the potential for pain.
Those songs that speak of love without having within their lines an ache or sigh are not love songs at all but rather they are hate songs disguised as love songs and they are not to be trusted."


-Nick Cave
"the Secret Life of the Love Song"
Please enjoy!

You do not have to be good

Mykle and I were talking about his rather extraordinary view of evil, which is; that Evil does not exist.
Maybe the view is not so extraordinary as it is unordinary, anyhow-
It's always interesting to be with such a strong and different personality such as he.
Our conversation reminded me of one of my favorite poems, which hung above our bed for years:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


-Mary Oliver
"Wild Geese"



I have been sitting on the floor framing pictures from one of my enduring obsessions, "The Garden of Earthy Delights" by Hieronymous Bosch. I want to someday go to Madrid to see it in the Prado. One of my favorite parts of it is the painting on the outside doors of it (for it is a sectional triptych that opens), which I first saw on the inside of an album ("Clouds") by Joni Mitchell (my first musical love).
I think obsessions choose you. They keep appearing and you cant ignore them after a while.
I once crashed a party where there was a big wood-sectioned reproduction of The Garden of Earthy Delights on the mantle, triptych with hinges and all. I have never wanted to steal anything so bad. (Except maybe the "Life- sized" carved wooden unicorn skull at 5 & Diamond in San Francisco!) The triptych was cleverly guarded by a candelabra with actual candles though, and I left empty handed. It would have been pretty ironic to steal it anyway.

I love the internet sometimes. A search for that unicorn skull led to this. Go to Ben Shaffer's website to look at his other stuff, which is psychadelic talismanic shrapnel.


His website Ben Shaffer

My website also pops on the first page of the image search for "wood unicorn skull". And this is BEFORE this post is published. Ha ha.