Americana, Nostalgia, Silt, Sex, and Sugar

Sometimes also glitter and deserts

I have been loving Petra Collins lately.

Knowledge/Mind/World

the environment is just as responsible for producing the conditions necessary for us to experience it, as those conditions of our mind are responsible for us apprehending the world in the way that we do. 

Take-home message for session № 2 of my class.

The Brightest Song About Death

It's not really about death. It's about dying for your beliefs - being scorned for them, and dying for them. And it's the gentlest, brightest treatment, as only John Darnielle can effect. Even backed up by a full band and beats, not the usual single voice and lone guitar. I want to live every day feeling as good as this song makes me feel.

A comic strip describing the songs off this album, lighthearted, but still not uncryptic

Judgment Day

Everyone needs to work. Can there be something romantic, story-worthy, song-worthy, film-worthy, about this day in and day out? Music makes it worth while, poetry makes it worthwhile. Love, makes it worthwhile. The ability to capture time passed poetically - time that is not otherwise necessarily poetic, makes it okay. Makes it not just liveable, but romantic. I come back to this sterile place after a weekend, and when I have thought, lived, created, loved - only then does it all feel worthwhile. So when I wake up on that Monday morning, and my heart, and my mind are either full or empty of the things I have or haven't done, the feelings I have or haven't felt, the lands I have or haven't traversed, the progress of emotional intelligence I have or haven't made, the words or paint strokes I have or haven't created, the beautiful places I have or haven't wandered, the new craft I have or haven't learned, the love I have or haven't nurtured...Monday morning at 6:30 am is my judgment day, over and over again.

So Beautiful, and the Thoughts that I Live For

The Cellar Door Is An Open Throat

The machine on my lap is hot and making me sweat. Wires running everywhere. And I am still listening to the Mountain Goats which makes it hard to swallow sometimes, especially when I find notes in the liner like this:

"We came into town under cover of night, because we

were pretty sure the people here were going to hate us
once they really got to know us. In our lives together, which
are sweet in the way of rotting things, it is somehow
permanently summer.

THE MOON rose above the trees, older than time,
greener than money. You hung your head out the window
of our dusty lemon-yellow El Camino and howled, and I
turned up the radio, because the sound of your voice was
already beginning to get to me. The speakers crackled
and the music came through: Frankie Valli and the Four
Seasons. Pretty as a midsummer's morn, they call her
Dawn. Let the love of God come and get is if it wants
us so bad. We know were we are going when all of 
this is done.

SOME PEOPLE MIGHT SAY that buying a house you've
never actually seen close-up is a bad idea, but what does
anybody know about our needs, anyhow? For us it was
perfect. The peeling paint. The old cellar. The garden in
the back. The porch out front. The still air of the living
room. The attic. Everywhere entirely unfurnished and
doomed to remain largely so, save for our own meager
offerings: a cheap sofa, an old mattress, a couple of chairs
and some ashtrays. Maybe a table salvaged from some diner
gone into bankruptcy, I don't remember. Neither do you.
We drank store-brand gin with fresh lime juice out of plastic
cups or straight from the bottle and we spread ourselves out
face-up on the wooden floors. An aerial view of us might
have suggested that we'd been knocked out, but what we were
doing was staking our claim. Establishing our territories.
Making good. Not on the vows we'd made but on the ones
we'd really meant. You produced a wallet-sized transistor
radio out of nowhere and you found a sympathetic station:
somebody was playing Howlin' Wolf. Smokestack lightning.
O yes, I loved you once. O yes, you loved me more. We entered
our new house like a virus entering its host. You following
me, me following you. However you like. The windows were
high and the walls were thick and sturdy. It was hot as blazes.
The guts of summer. Always down in the sugar-deep barrel-
bottom belly of summer itself. Always. In our shared walk
down to the bottom, which bottom we will surely find if only
our hearts are brave and our love true enough, we have found
that it is somehow invariably and quite permanently summer."

The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee

The Mountain Goats

"hot wind coming off the water
the sky gone crazy with stars
while we stay here we imagine we're alive
we see shadows on the walls
there's something waiting for us in the hot, wet air
sweat, water and alcohol
just the old blood
rising up through the wooden floor again
just the old love
asking for more again"

Listened to the Mountain Goats on the way to work this morning and they took me so far away. So far. Took me to cross country drives and southern sunsets, star-scattered stratospheres and rivers and motel rooms in July and car rides in heat and mid western storm-swirled skies with windows down, gas station pit stops, crickets and tall grass. Neon motel pools heat of day in the dead of night.

I want to go there with my  boy. Boy, take me away.

What Knowledge Is

from http://www.creatingfreedom.info/

The Boatman's Call

Tonight, I did nothing, But fall in love with Nick Cave again.

And reaffirm my vow, that if only one single artist I could listen to from now until the day I died, Nick Cave it would be.

Good Morning Beautiful

I want to sit by the ocean with you.

Firescape

Photographs by husband.

Lower Haight Art