I’m getting excited about the theme for the upcoming Exquisite Corpse – The Left Eye of Horus.
Norah came up with it, and I’m so glad because it’s given me the opportunity to explore an aesthetic
that I’ve always found very alluring: Egyptian Goth. I call it that, but really it’s a mish-mash of traditional
and fantastical styles from a variety of Middle Eastern countries and peoples. The bleak tales of death in
the desert from The Sheltering Sky, and the wraithed, black-clad shapes, of kohl-eyed, tattooed Berber
women shimmering on the horizon planted the seed, which grew into a lush little oasis: a stark vision in
black and white, hung with hammered silver and gold. Heavy clouds of incense, sharply scented with
Sandalwood, papyrus, lotus, and sycamore. These are embalming herbs, for canning hearts in canopic jars.
Bear with me while I wax rhapsodic, won’t you? The mysteries from the fertile crescent continue to inspire, even
as in modern Egypt, at the very moment I write this, Hosni Mubarak is standing (or laying down on a bed in a
cage, actually) trial for the murders of over 850 peaceful protesters who died fighting for change from the days
of ancient Egypt – when pharoahs could hold a throne hostage for generations while amassing untold riches
If you’re interested in keeping up with what’s happening in Egypt, I can’t recommend a better source than Mona Eltahawy.
I had the pleasure of meeting her last year, and we struck up an immediate connection. We talked about writing, but at
the time, I had no idea that she was an award-winning columnist or a total information powerhouse on Arab and Muslim
issues, until January 25th. I had come across her card, and decided to start following her Twitter feed, which is pretty much
the most up to the minute source for whatever’s going down in Egypt politically at any given moment. She’s truly amazing.

Sapho – Methylene

So, in part this post is dedicated to some strong women – Mona, my friend Zahra-Jane, and also Oum Khalthoum (who I’ll get to later…)
Zahra and I were Livejournal friends from way back, and finally had the pleasure of meeting one another for real recently in Chicago.
She has an incredible aesthetic sense and has turned me on to so much awesome stuff over the years. For this post in particular, I asked
her to recommend any treasures I might be overlooking, and she sent me some wonders, indeed. I also heavily pillaged her kick-ass tumblr
The Signs in the Stars and her beautiful blog, Black Celebration – go check out both and be delighted and inspired! I can’t thank her enough for showing me Sapho, a moroccan singer who hung out with Siouxsie in the 80′s and made awesome egyptian-inspired new wave!

Siouxsie and the Banshees – Arabian Knights

I collect khamsas (or hands of Fatima) – my grandmother always wore a big silver filigree one when she traveled,
and I remember always being fascinated and drawn to it. I wear it when I fly, and treasure it immensely. Sacred hands.

Givenchy Haute Couture Fall Winter 2009/2010 Full Show

I am FEELING this show so deeply. Knockin’ ‘em cold in black + gold is my permanent fashion motto,
and this just does it all for me. Now where can I get my hands on piles and piles of gold headdresses,
elaborately wrought paillettes, handfuls of massive knuckledusters, et cetera? I need it all by tomorrow.

I love these headdresses:

Dying for this one, made by my girl Miss Arielle de Pinto – her work is beyond fabulous. I desire silvery mounds of it.

Not sure where this one came from, but I sure do love it.

Sequin masks from the Givenchy show… DIY, y’all!

I love this photo of Inga & Anush Arshakyans. Watch out if you click on this link – the video is whoa.
They’re Armenian, but whatever – they look rad.

Oum, Umm, Oumme, Ümmü, OM!

From Zahra-Jane’s killer post on Oum Kalthoum
“The details of a woman. Oum Kalthoum. b. December 31st, circa 1900-1904, Egypt. the capricorn. Star of Egypt.
Queen of tarab, which is that…”this is MY JAM” feeling you get. Tarab is like a state beyond enjoyment, a state of
almost oneness and total ecstasy with the song. There is also a level of audience participation, the crowd moves the singer,
who moves the crowd, which allows an especially spiritual element which decades later, you feel listening to these recordings.
Enchantment is a popular translation, but the word seems almost too quaint for what I feel when I hear Oum Kalthoum.
It is no shock that she has inspired some of my favorite artists, from Nico, to Maria Callas.”

1938 Kodachrome film of two Ouled Nail dancers. Silent.
I recommend that you watch it while playing the track below.

Egyptian lover – Egypt Egypt

Pola Negri

From a 1970′s Playboy magazine

Nefertiti by Youssef Nabil

Shirin Neshat by Youssef Nabil

Kate performs “Egypt” on a 1979 Christmas special.
She is so bonkers. God, I love her.

Follow the Nile
Deep to much deeper.
The Pyramids sound lonely tonight.

She’s got me with that feline guise,
Got me in those desert eyes.
She’s got me with that feline guise,
Got me in those desert eyes.
Oh I’m in love
With Egypt.

I had the pleasure of meeting Maria Dahvana Headley, author of Queen of Kings,
(my own copy is tantalizing me at this very moment from my nightstand!)
recently – she is a fiercely joyous hummingbird of a woman, who I immediately adored.
We had discussed creating an event around her book-signing here in Austin to celebrate
her new work, which is all about vampires and monsters in ancient Egypt. It didn’t work
out time-wise, but the inspiration lingered – so I’ll dedicate this Exquisite Corpse to her
as well! I can’t wait to delve into this world she’s created…

Another book that comes to mind when developing this theme is an old favorite – Storm Constatine’s Wraeththu, a trilogy that shaped many of my views about style, gender, magic and provided a beautiful vision of a post-human, post-apocalypse future.

Illan Riviere is a consumate androgynous Wraeththu Har – and one of the most incredible dancers I’ve ever seen.

From ZJ’s post on Propaganda Magazine

The Sisters Of Mercy – Temple Of Love (Featuring Ofra Haza)

This was my number one favorite song throughout much of my childhood. I was (and still am) so, so into it.
During the 2011 Egyptian Revolution the song enjoyed a surge in popularity among the younger population of protesters:

All the old paintings on the tombs
They do the sand dance don’t you know
If they move too quick (oh way oh)
They’re falling down like a domino

Foreign types with the hookah pipes say
Ay oh way oh, ay oh way oh
Walk like an Egyptian

Natacha Atlas – Leysh Natarak

The Brooklyn-based artist Swoon, who may know from her beautiful wheat-pasted cut-out street art (and the following flotillas:
Miss Rockaway Armada, Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, Swimming Cities of Serenissima) is bringing a landmark, permanent
sculpture to the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans. This “house” also functions as a musical instrument. A growing group of
local and national sound artists are creating interactive instruments that will be built into its walls and floorboards so that visitors
can bring the house to life through their touch. How does a house sing? How does it keep a beat? Can a house be played like a trumpet?
These are the kind of questions will be answering this fall when we launch The Music Box – A Shantytown Sound Laboratory, which is the
first incarnation of what will evolve into Dithyrambalina. Our prototypes will gather together in a musical village of singing shanties!

Swoon’s “Ice Queen”, (currently debuting at MOCA, Los Angeles’ Art in the Streets exhibition).
Screen print on paper, coffee stained and hand painted, 2′x3′, signed in an edition of ten.
Happy to say that all three of these beautiful pieces went to each of our awesome Kickstarter backers who pledged $3000 or more!

We are very excited to be collaborating with Elizabeth Shannon, a hero of the New Orleans art world since the 1970′s on the shanty
that will shelter our piece TINTINNABULATION STATION. This temporary installation will run from October thru early January and will
be built on the future site of the Dithyrambalina in the New Orleans Bywater neighborhood. Over the course of the exhibition we will
welcome visitors, hold children’s workshops, and present a three-part series of performances featuring local and national musicians who
will orchestrate original works on the devices. Check out our fellow artists, also – we’re amongst great company of some dear friends and many future friends! I’d love it if you’d take a moment to go read more about this project – the whys and wherefores, the inspirations, and the spirit behind it. I’m so proud to be a part of this beautiful thing! The Dithrambalina Kickstarter Campaign ends Thursday Jul 28, 8:49am,
and not only did meet our goal, but nearly doubled it! However – any and all additional pledges are appreciated and needed! Additional funding will go towards build costs for the Dithyrambalina house, developing more instrumentation, and paying our artists and musicians
for all their hard work. We would all be so grateful for any donations, and for any help spreading the word about this project!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Swoon and Sound Collaborator Taylor Shepherd Discuss the Project

P.S. Have you been wondering why Swoon calls the musical house Dithyrambalina?
The root of the name comes from the ancient Greek work dithyramb. A dithyramb
was the chant of wild abandon sung by the devotees of Dionysus to call for their God.

Dionysus was the god of the grape harvest and wine, and he connotes ritual madness
and ecstasy in Greek mythology. He is generally depicted as an enchantingly beautiful
man attended by a debauched procession of animals, dancers, and music makers.
Suffice it to say that Dionysus has never missed a Mardi Gras in New Orleans!
– from the Dithyrambalina blog, which is chockablock with good stuff – go see!

School picture day! 7th grade. For real.

You see, we met when I was 13 and she was 11. The setting: a manky teenage boy’s bedroom in the trashiest
trailer in our neighborhood. I was in the middle of having my first kiss with a chubby boy who I agreed to try
making out with on basis of the fact that he had Robert Smith hair (sort of). The soundtrack: The Glove – Blue Sunshine.
With song titles like “Punish Me With Kisses” and “Mouth to Mouth“, it really couldn’t have been much more apt. I was much
more captivated with the album (it took me years to track it down and hear it again! Still a major favorite.) than I was
with the kissing. I think I was a little stoned, and all I could think about was giant pink slugs undulating. ¡El Grosso Maximo!
At the sound of the door creaking open, we wriggled apart, and through a veil of shaggy bangs that I thought hid my awesome
coke-bottle glasses (they totally, uh, didn’t.) I spied a feral wolf-child. A sullen cherub with a nimbus of golden curls that glowed
in the blacklight bulb. She stomped in all tough in plaid skater shorts and monkey boots. We eyed each other, and I think both
realized instantly that we were saved. Literally, in so many ways. We say it all the time, but it doesn’t make it any less true
that if we hadn’t stumbled across each other at that time in our lives, that both of us would have probably ended up dead
or worse. How fate decided to bless us by having our parents find houses right down the street from each other made up
(a bit) for all the other ways she decided to completely fuck us up. Soon, we were spending every free moment together,
hanging out in burned-out, abandoned houses after school and sneaking out of our bedroom windows to smoke pilfered
ciggies and wander around. Eventually we were dressing up like baby hooker vampires and cadging rides to nightclubs
and yet somehow made it back in our beds every night before 4am and go to school in the morning. We were wild, bad
little Lolitas, and it’s a goddamn miracle that we made it out of adolescence so (relatively) unscathed. Amazing, really.

I can’t find the picture of us as baby vampires, so instead here’s us dazed + starry-eyed after modeling in our first fashion show
at the very first New Bohemia, when it was over on Duval. Back in the day, man. We were such babies! Children! What.

Pea on St. Valentine’s Day back in our old place on Royal + Mandeville.
Observe her emu claw diadem and scars from Cupid’s arrows. Heartbreaker!

Sweet valentines. I am grateful to say that this girl was my very first lover, and who better to be initiated into
the mysteries of love than the person you love most in the world, your best friend and partner in crime?
We were lucky. We are lucky. She has taught me so much in these past (holy shit) 19 years…

Queen Marie, still from Pastrisetimania. – “Cake Sits, a fetishistic photo series.”

CYGNUS OLOR
This video is a collaboration between Dana Sherwood and The Black Forest Fancies
An incorrigible collector with an eye for the exotic captures a swan girl and holds her captive in a confectionary cabin

For the past few years, Pandora was working with the Dream Community in Taiwan,
living in rural villages, and working with the inhabitants to build large scale puppets and stage colorful parades.

I’ll let the beautiful Princess of the Puyuma tell you about it in her own words:
In this year overburdened by impossible goodbyes, I’d simply forgotten to miss Taiwan.
I’ve taken the double life summer dive headfirst into color I never can suffer at home.
The electric magenta hibiscus, relentless fuchsia and indigo of tree climbing orchids.
Tropical shades that sear the retina when viewed at midday and emanate neon through
thunderstorm gray. We have such colors in the swamps where I’ve nestled. We’ve the
requisite cruelty of the hot house garrote, anesthetized in narcotic notes of jasmine and datura.
But here these colors throb with mountains’ magic, erupting from black rock and vapour like Boschian
airships suspended in battle – a mesozoic sex display, the glow of which recalls the natal moments when
this magma formed landscape was molten. The timeless beauty of the mountains underlining indignity
of the cinderblock cityscapes, alive with devouring mold. Tree and trellis spangled with giant spiders,
Giger aliens spinning omens, and all we monstrous spinners on display.

Our parade work this year concerns the rediscovery and celebration of Taiwan’s aboriginal cultures.
There are 14 active and politically recognized tribes in Taiwan today, each with their own unique language,
mythology and cultural practices. There are at least a dozen more unrecognized tribes whose organization is
decentralized, as reflected in the death or morbidity of their language and dispersal of their genetic strains.
Archeological research suggests that the ancestors of the current tribes have been living on this island since 8000
years before Chinese immigration began in the 17th century. They have an ethnic identity that is distinct from the
Asian mainland but now comprise only 2 percent of Taiwan’s population, the majority of the population being
ethnically and linguistically Chinese. From the beginning of recorded history the aboriginal peoples have experienced
economic and military conflict with a global menagerie of covetous colonizers: western and northern Europeans,
north and south Americans, the Japanese, who came armed with the anvil of archeology. They staged digs and
opened museums, nailed bare asses into grey woolen writing desks in a thousand thatch roofed classrooms.
Turning practice into history as they systematically laid the – timeless – life of the village to waste.
A clock forever counting circles round the irrevocable bootprints of modernity.

Today as ever looms the ubiquitous spectre of lady China, face-shifting parasite sister to the all-too-proximal north.
These colonial viruses have redefined the island with almost comic regularity, invasions so frequent that they echo the
seasonal tracks of typhoon – violently resurfacing the patterns of life and landscape with language shifts and cultural
(re)assimilation. In keeping with the common plight of indigenous peoples the world over, Taiwanese aboriginals face
steep social barriers rooted in prejudice and exclusion: unemployment, substandard state provision for healthcare and
education, squalid housing and farming conditions, staggering rates of alcoholism and drug addiction. Since the 1980s
efforts have been undertaken on the part of the surviving tribes toward a revival of ethnic identity.
These include incorporating elements of their culture into commercial and artistic endeavors, pop music and pageantry.
That’s where we parade makers figure in. Putting craft through its paces and the spinners on display.

Falling in love with an enameled sewing machine. I mean, wouldn’t you?

The Mudlark Confectionary a cabinet of curious conceptions.

Dolls of The Mudlark Confectionary

Saint Dymphna
These days though, Pandora owns and operates the Mudlark Public Theatre in New Orleans upper Ninth Ward
neighborhood and is the artistic director of that space’s resident company, The Mudlark Puppeteers and co-founder
of the Black Forest Fancies Ltd. She makes puppets, dolls, sets and stories. She is a weaver of magic webs.

A puppet from The Black Wallows Foundling Hospital.

So here’s the deal, in her own words:
In the month of June I had the extreme pleasure of working as a craftswoman on an installation of my dear friend Mark Dion’s
design for a site on a National Tourist Road in Norway. The piece will be located at the top of a mountain, near a glacier
in the incomparably beautiful area of Ardal. A number of world-reknowned artists have been selected by the Norwegian
Tourist Bureau to contribute work to such sites. Notable among these is the last work of the brilliant metal artist Louise Bourgeois,
which is a memorial to the victims of the witch-burnings at Vardo Island, in the North of Norway.

I am constantly at work and seeking future opportunities. I now, a month after completing my contribution to the piece in Norway, still
haven’t even the vaguest clue as to when I will be paid. None of us do. Even Mark, with his esteemed reputation and integrality to the
completion of the project next year, has been given what can only be called ‘the serious, red-tape runaround.’ At first we were told simply
to be patient, that everything was being done in its proper order. The latest word is that all payments are on hold until the end of the
Norwegian Summer holidays – at some time in August. While the bureaucrats summer in sunnier climes, our invoices are evidently on some
Kafka-esque nightmare ride through the gears of a grim machine of the very old garde, and as in Kafka, there is no indication as to where
or when the ride might terminate. In short, I budgeted my life around money I have no access to for the indefinite future.
I have been unavailable for all other work in this period and consequently find myself at a pretty serious financial impasse.
I have had to cancel many plans, the most poignant being a visit to my hometown of Austin, TX to visit my oldest friends and
light candles at my parents’ memorials in honor of my 30th birthday, which is July 22nd.
I am hoping to sell some of my past-works, mostly hand sculpted art-dolls, to offset the deficit.
– Pandora Gastelum

If you’d like to help, please take a look at some of her work over at The Mudlark Confectionary,
and be on the lookout for her handmade art dolls for sale soon on etsy under mudlarkconfectionary
(we’re working on getting her shop up, but in the meantime, let me know if you have any questions
about purchasing pieces!) She has gifted me a new dolly for my every birthday for years, and each
one is perfect and comes intact with their very own soul. I treasure them enormously.

(Photo by Petra Arnold)
Happy birthday, star of the sea, poppy petal princess, peach-pie pea-pod, sweet sister, dearheart!

All quotes below are from Virginia Woolf’s book, Orlando: A Biography, upon which
the film was based. Obviously, they go hand in hand in the wonderfulness department. Read it.

“He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree
to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship — it was anything
indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side;
the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out.”

“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading.
They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away
and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.”

“For it would seem – her case proved it – that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person.
The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”

The brilliant Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth. What a clever thrill is the scene between he and Tilda,
him playing a great old dowager empress, and her playing a young sprig of noble youth, a gingery boy.

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden
and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.”

“Was not poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”

“In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America,
I see men flying- but how is it done? I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.”

“Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite,
and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature,
who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why
we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head
ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer
“Yes”; if we are truthful we say “No”; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of
this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect ragbag of
odds and ends within us—a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil—
but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress,
and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes
next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand
towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting,
like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no
man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.”

“For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy.
It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other.
Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them. In this case, Orlando’s love began her flight
towards him with her white face turned, and her smooth and lovely body outwards. Nearer and nearer she came
wafting before her airs of pure delight. All of a sudden (at the sight of the Archduchess presumably) she wheeled about,
turned the other way round; showed herself black, hairy, brutish; and it was Lust the vulture, not Love, the Bird of Paradise
that flopped, foully and disgustingly, upon his shoulders. Hence he ran; hence he fetched the footman.”

I found this beautiful photo and great quote over at Sophie Ward’s Papercastle Press: PYJAMA TOAST

“One of Tilda’s many ideas about having the big house in Nairn was that people would come and be around;
interesting people for her kids to meet. Like a salon, I suppose. It’s peaceful out there but often at weekends there’s
a whole variety of people. It’s quite variable and chaotic. There’s no television. You can get a lot done and you’re
in very pleasant company. It’s never boring. The guy who does their decorating is fantastic, really interesting to talk to.
You’ve got a huge continuum of people who may or may not be high powered in the outside world, but you don’t know
because everybody’s just in their pyjamas eating toast. Which is how you should meet people”
–AL Kennedy, Writer

This is so, so great:
Sally Potter and Tilda Swinton Discuss Their Film Orlando

Orlando trailer

A change of sex

I couldn’t resist this sweet La Roux/Orlando mash-up. Again with the ginger ladies! Sigh.

So, also the kitten we found in the bushes last year, Bojangles, went through a similar transformation.
We had always assumed that Bojangles was a boy – the orangeness (orange cats are 80% male), the appearance of what
we thought were testicles (eh?), and the fact that he was spraying things down territorially with piss. I mean! Really?
All signs pointed to dude. Imagine my shock, when one night at 3am I looked up from my book, hearing a strange squalling.
A little peachy lumpkin had tumbled out of my Grampy’s old armoire and had become tangled in a hat veil. I was so perplexed!
Where had this little thing come from? A pregnant cat has snuck into my armoire and given birth to two kittens! Strangely,
Bojangles was very interested and concerned about these newborns. I took in the dilated, crazy-mom gaze, her mowling,
and the fact that these two larvae looked exactly like her, and it finally dawned on me – my cat had had a change of sex.
Well, probably not – but! Given the story, and her gingery complexion, we decided that maybe we should change her
name from Renfield Bojangles Whiskerwitz Tom Tum Shrimp Scampi to Orlando, or Tilda, or maybe Tillie for short?
Of course, none of that happened – we call the cat Booey. Very undignified, but it stuck. She’s fixed and happy now!

Did you ever see anything so adorable in your entire life? I thought not.
We gave them to my two little cousins, Molly + Eliza who decided that they
should be named Pumpkin Pie and Apple Pie Zucchini Bread. Well, of course!

Grrizelda and Booey are best friends. The cuddle like this and make out all the time.
It’s ridiculous. You can see here that they are actually holding hands. Paws. Whatever, it’s amazing.

More about when we found poor little Booey here:
Peachtree Moon
So strange to think it’s been nearly a year since then.
So much has changed in my life. So much happened right
then, and it was hard changes – but I can say now, for the
best. Funny to look at that old tarot reading and be able
to see it all so much more clearly now. It’s all there.

✸ Really enjoying Martine Johanna lately. Beautiful work.

✸ Lori Field’s Forest Stories
I also really love these encaustic paintings. Wonderful, dreamy colors.
“Lori Field’s paintings depict a world where animals and humans live together in enchanted forests
filled with two headed skeleton kittens, Tiger goose head cows, and baby ram angels.”

“Virvon, varvon/tuoreeks, terveeks, tulevaks vuodeks/sulle vitsa/ mulle palkka”
✸ I LOVE this holiday: Virvon, varvon…
“I will wish, whisk and whack/ you health and happiness/
for this new season/ for you the branch/ for me the prize.”

✸ The wonderful Slavic folktale styled graphic work of Tin Can Forest is making me very happy.
“The deep, dark forest of our collective unconscious has never seemed more beautiful and mysterious
than in the images of Tin Can Forest. The Toronto-based team of artists Pat Shewchuk and Marek Colek
spin tales where barter-happy demons and animal spirits, drawn from Slavic folklore, walk in step with
witches and villagers. We caught up with Tin Can Forest to ask them about their work and new book
‘Baba Yaga and the Wolf’ from Koyama Press.”

✸ The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga
“The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga examines man’s interaction with the mythic woodlands of Eastern Europe,
detailing the bloody history and complex psychologies that transformed the forest from a conceptually sinister space into
a realm of precious security. Mushroom hunting provides a passageway into the history of the region and helps reveal the
roles that woodlands play in the psychology and sociology of fear, imagination, and survival.

Baba Yaga was vanquished by necessity when refugees of war and social unrest fled to her woods for shelter, nourishment, and
sanctuary. Drawing on fairy tales, folklore, and personal recollections, The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga examines how
the collective, social memory of Eastern Europe both shaped and shapes local relationships with the forest.”
This looks really wonderful. Watch the promo video!

✸ Eastern Europe’s Evil Granny Rules Two New Novels, “Deathless” and “Baba Yaga Laid An Egg”
I’m reading both of these right now. So, so good!

A candid shot from Devaki Knowles of me applying my lip-rouge at the most recent Vintage Vivant.
The next one’s theme is Storyville Bordello! Scandalous! Salacious! Shocking!

Another treasure from Pink Tentacle – Anatomical illustrations from Edo-period Japan
This anatomical illustration is from the book Kanshin Biyō, by Bunken Kagami.

From Joanna Ebenstein’s “Private Cabinets” Photo Series, Volume 1: Barrister’s Gallery, “Morbid Anatomy Cabinet” Exhibition

From the Home Collection of Evan Michelson, Antiques Dealer, New Jersey

My pals Dark Dark Dark were just here in Austin, and made me fall in love with them all over again.
This is one of my favorite songs of theirs. I sing it all day long, and so will you, I hope.

Tell me what you celebrate
It isn’t hard to do…
Do you love me?
Do you love that paint?
Exposing the brick
They’re crumbling a bit
Do you love the bees
Fly over our heads
Race into the woods
Make honey so sweet

And tell me what you celebrate
It isn’t hard to do
Do you love me
A walk on the street
Oh lavender!
The scent fills the air
Oh remember
The hand sewn quilt
We laid on it there
We laid on it there…

✸ As Above So Below
My friend Bruce Webb has an exhibition of some of his impressive
collection of fraternal order paraphernalia up at Domy Books this month.

✸ My darling dearest Dana Sherwood has a new project called All My Dresses
“Archiving twenty years of collecting vintage dresses, some have been destroyed,
some have been “borrowed”, none have been intentionally discarded.”

Thvm ✸ Rag for Arielle de Pinto from mary-catharine anderson on Vimeo.

A beautiful video featuring my friend Miss Arielle de Pinto‘s gorgeous woven chain jewelry.

✸ Look at Me, I’m Crying
A beautiful piece on crying in public in New York City. I can relate, having found myself doing just that, far too often,
on my last excursion up there. Maybe it was the insidious combination of mercury retrograde and vicious sinus infection
that made me more susceptible than usual to uncontrollably weeping on streetcorners, park benches, Duane Reade,
the backs of various taxis. It was kind of ridiculous. I remember being sandwiched on a bench between a henna-haired
bag lady and a lanky teenage boy reading an old science fiction paperback. They just shared the space with me,
and let me cry – oblivious or unbothered, but it was oddly peaceable. The Nigerian cab driver was much more
disturbed, begging me to stop my weeping, and promising to somehow help me figure out how to get from Prospect
Park South to Williamsburg in fifteen minutes. Yeah, that didn’t end up working out, but he was very nice to me.
“If you live in New York, you’re bound to end up crying in public eventually; there just aren’t enough private places.
Just the other day I saw someone doing it on West 12th Street. A tall woman in a beret, with a curtain of reddish hair,
she had tears streaming down her cheeks. She wasn’t on the phone, wasn’t accompanied by a man, or a mom or even
a dog. She wasn’t beautiful, the way a lot of people in New York are, but I couldn’t look away.”

I love this beauty from Jeremy Enecio – thank you, Mlle. Wurzeltod!

✸ Her Voice in My Head I love, love, love
this piece by Emma Forrest about Kate Bush in the Paris Review. Go read it RIGHT NOW!

Caresse P-Orridge & Sickmob – “R. U. Experienced?”

✸ Two new scientific studies reveal hallucinogens are good for your mental health

✸ Ruslana Korshunova – The Lost Girl
Why did a supermodel at the top of her game—hauntingly beautiful and only 20—kill herself in 2008?
A filmmaker describes his three-year quest for clues, and answers.

✸ The Lost Boys
“In December 1970 two teenagers disappeared from the Heights neighborhood, in Houston.
Then another and another and another. As the number of missing kids grew, no one realized
that the most prolific serial killer the country had ever seen—along with his teenage accomplices—
was living comfortably among them. Or that the mystery of what happened to so many of his
victims would haunt the city to this day.”

✸ The exceptional mourning of twins
From Mind Hacks:
“I’ve just found an amazing article that looks at how the death of twins is mourned in cultures around the world.
The journal Twin Research and Human Genetics is usually dedicated to the science of twin studies –
a key method for understanding the role of genetics and the environment on the development of human traits.
In 2002 they had a special issue that took a very different look at the subject – examining grief and mourning related to twins.
One of the articles is a stunning look at the anthropology of twin death, exploring the diverse and intriguing beliefs and practices concerning twin death.”

Articles about three heroes of mine:
✸ The Official Justin Bond

✸ The Invisible Scent – Christopher Brosius

✸ Poly Styrene (3 July 1957 – 25 April 2011) from Coilhouse

✸ the greening life from Moonshine Junkyard
These same thoughts have been buzzing around my brain, but I didn’t have a word to hold them close – until now: viriditas!
“the light green heart of the living fullness of nature.”
Thanks for this, Tam.

O much neglected corner of the world – little quiet place where I come to lay down my findings,
hollowed-out tree trunk where I store treasure. I am embarrassed at how little I’ve been able to
find the time, the wherewithal, the peace of mind to write here. Too much has been happening
for one heart to hold, much less one little snippet of a post here. It’s been a strange and heavy time,
during which I’ve been struggling to keep up, keep my head above water, find a moment to breathe in.
In the swarm of activity following Mardi Gras and during SXSW, I returned to find my favorite person
in the world depleted and depressed – my 97 year old grandfather, Charlie, went into the hospital on
New Year’s Eve, and had been transferred to a glorified nursing home, where he withered like an
unwatered houseplant. I felt the horror and guilt of Beauty returning to the Beast’s castle to find him
fading fast, dying on the flagstones. I’d never seen my Grandpa laid so low, so unhappy and without
hope. A few days later, he started vomiting blood, and was rushed to the emergency room. I’ve never
been so terrified, so broken at the thought of losing him. It sounds absurd, I suppose – coming from me,
since I’ve lost so many dear ones already. I am used to death, in a way – and I do prepare myself for it,
perhaps more than is healthy. But not with him. How ridiculous to be totally in denial about the mortality
of someone so advanced in years, right? But I am, I have been – for a long time now, totally unwilling to
even consider the possibility of him not being here. Same with my dad, who recently went through chemo
and radiation for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. To have both of them so threatened at once? Beyond horrifying.
Every day, I stifled a silent scream at the thought of my Papa and Grandpa laid so low, of losing them.
Instead, I sucked in my fear and loathing of hospitals, and made my voice a bright thing, a shiny balloon
filled with hopefulness, rising towards the ceiling. I stood by my Grandpa’s bed for hours, holding his hands
and giving him everything I had, praying desperately that he could recover strength to his suffering kidneys,
to his legs, his lungs, his heart. Miraculously, all of our prayers were answered, and he did grow stronger, and
became much happier, especially since we told him he never had to go back to that nursing home/rehabilitation
center he’d been trying out. I’d lay awake at night, unable to sleep, consumed with worry, with fury, at the thought
of him laying alone there. What a grave injustice that someone who has lived such a long and fascinating life should
find themselves at the other end of it, in a place that affords them so little dignity. How awful, that there should be so
few options for the elderly in this country – particularly since we’re living longer and longer lives. The sad thing is
that the place he was in was actually one of the better ones around – he chose it after visiting the nursing home
recommended by the hospital and finding it to be “a warehouse for storing people who are at the end of their lives”
(his words). Nursing homes throughout America are chronically understaffed and underfunded, with food that I
literally wouldn’t feed to my dogs. Seriously – mystery meat and baloney sandwiches? You can get better food in prison.
In the midst of all this, poor Japan suffered her violent shiftings, and the whole world seemed on the verge of some
great reckoning. My grandparents visited Japan in the 80′s, before my grandmother became too frail for travel.
I remember seeing pictures of her dolled up in a kimono like a tiny, ancient geisha. They loved it there, and told
me many stories about everything they saw and experienced. Grampa loved the Noh and Kabuki theater, and brought
back masks for his collection. We had hoped to go back together, but he decided he wasn’t up for travel a few years back.

The entrance of a cave at Enoshima Island – Soshu Enoshima Iwaya-no dzu
ANDO HIROSHIGE – FAMOUS PLACES IN JAPAN

I still have never been there. One day, I shall. For the last few years, Grampa has given me big, beautiful editions of the collected
prints of Hiroshige for my birthday. I’ve been paging through them lately, admiring the elegance of line depicting many
formerly serene coastlines and villages I know are now destroyed. I’ve been thinking about the way the elderly are regarded
in Japanese culture – as integral and important members of society, to be respected and honored – not shoved in old people
jails and forgotten about the way we do here. Or maybe that’s been changing there too. I’ve been thinking about the tidal wave
dreams I used to have, about not trying to outrun them anymore, but instead trying to face them head-on, standing with arms open:
letting the waves of sorrow wash over me, letting them take what they will from me. This is hard, maybe the hardest thing I have ever
done – trying to accept this inevitable loss. I can’t bear the thought of it. Can’t stomach hearing well-meaning friends telling me things
that only make them feel better, like: “He’s had a long, full life…” or “Think of how lucky you are to have had that time together…”
I don’t want to hear it. I want him to live forever. Is that so much to ask? When you love someone deeply, there’s never enough time.

The (very, very, very!) good news is that Charlie’s doing much better lately – we found a really wonderful assisted living facility that
feels more like a home than a hospital, and he likes it there. His spirits are higher, and his overall health has improved. We have been
watching movies together – most recently “The King of Masks”, an amazing film about an aged street performer who practices the
change-mask opera art of bian lian. Grampa instilled a love of Chinese Opera in me early on, but I had never heard of or seen bian
lian before. Between Charlie’s love of masks, and a plot about a grandfather and granddaughter’s profound love, I knew I absolutely
had to find a way to share this movie with him. The first time I watched it, I found myself bawling like a child by the end. Luckily, I was
able to keep it more or less together when we watched it recently. He loved it as much as I had hoped, and we have a date to watch
Cocteau’s “La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc” together soon. Also on our list: “The Last Laugh”, “Casque D’or”, and “Amélie”.

(Please excuse the overwrought trailer with melodramatic voice-over.
I promise this film is worth seeing!)

I just got The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (finally!) and am devouring it. I ordered a large print copy
for Grampa to read, as I think he’ll enjoy it too. I fortuitously discovered David Mitchell on our last journey
abroad – I fell horribly ill in Athens, and was confined to bed for several days with a violent stomach bug.
Luckily, the hotel gift shop had a reasonable selection of reading material. I hesitated over the hot pink and
metallic blue fanfare of Cloud Atlas’ paperback cover, but it was just to curious to not investigate. I have a
vivid memory of being weakly tucked into a pillow fort, and being exhausted, but not being able to stop
reading. I turned to Grampa then, and told him, “This guy Mitchell is really, really, really good!” Oh my, isn’t
he? I love everything he’s done so far, and I can’t wait for him to write dozens more books. Hurry, hurry!
Oh, and – of course, the cover illustration features a print by none other than Ando Hiroshige. Perfect, that.

Gifts from my grandfather: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and
The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido

Books and movies are definitely my drug of choice lately. Somebody else’s lives. Blessed escape.
I’ve been running on empty for awhile, and have been struggling to repair myself, stitch my soul
back together. Fortunately, I’ve found an amazing person who’s helping me with that: Elaine Dove.
She’s a healer, counselor, artist, and teacher who has working with me, and even such in a relatively
short amount of time, has helped me immensely. I feel lucky to have found someone I trust to do this
work with me, and to help me process through this deep pain. It’s pretty incredible to have someone
tell me that I can rest as much as I need to heal, and to be told that I don’t have to let my grandfather
go before I’m ready to. Sometimes I really need to be given permission to give myself what I know I need.
Elaine is using the Tara Approach, an energy medicine system with its roots in Jin Shin Jyutsu,
a five element based meridian system of healing and balancing the nervous system.
Here’s something Elaine wrote on the subject of loss that stuck with me:

“There’s so much we long for. Loss makes us vulnerable, brings to the surface that which isn’t finished,
may never be finished. It may well be a fantasy that we get to finish everything we want to during the
course of a short and precious human life. At least, it seems like a fantasy to me. As someone who is
given the privilege of burrowing deeply into the lives of others like a little vole with good intentions,
there’s always another tunnel that opens, another rock to dig up, another tree root to burrow around.
It never ends until it ends. You don’t end up coming out where you went in. Then you’re not in the same
place any more. But you remember where you started. It’s an integral part of being human, to remember.”

✸ Pinetop Perkins, Delta Boogie-Woogie Master, Dies at 97 – I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Perkins,
on several occasions. He was performing up until almost the end of his life.
I remember the sparkle that shone through the gray
haze of his cataracted eyes, and his long, elegant hands.
He was the same age as my Grampa is now when he died.

✸ Hiroshige: A Fantastical Melding of Life, Land and Sea

✸ Mass Graves the Only Option for Many Japan Tsunami Victims

✸ On The Borderland in Okinawa – I’ve been reading Mlle. OTBL’s accounts of her adventures,
and came across this beautiful poem:
Be not defeated by the rain, nor let the wind prove your better.
Succumb not to the snows of winter. Nor be bested by the heat of summer.

This is my goal, the person I strive to become.

—Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), 雨ニモマケズ (Ame ni mo makezu), trans. by David Sulz
(The poem was found posthumously in a small black notebook in one of the poet’s trunks.)

My old friend Sxip Shirey and his band, Gentlemen & Assassins, wrote this song called “Grandpa Charlie”.
I’ve decided it’s about my very own Grampa Charlie, though I reckon he may have one too.
I love his introduction: “You know, this is a song about your grandfather, your grandfather,
your grandfather – when your grandfather was young, hot, and fucking sexy as shit.”

I know Grandpa would say, “Too loud!” – which is what he said when I took him to see
Gogol Bordello in Chicago. Eugene dedicated a song to him that night. It’s our job to dance now,
dance for them, our favorite old men – our grandfathers. I think I can handle that much.

Turkey buzzards overhead as Amethyst Deceivers played (our traveling
soundtrack was nearly exclusively Coil, both before and more poignantly,
after we learned of dear Unkle Sleazy’s passing…) I saw a giant carrion
bird gleefully gnawing on a smear of roadkill while listening to these lyrics:

Pay your respects to the vultures / for they are your future

I felt happy remembering that – that we are all one day fine feasts
for vultures and worms. I love the completeness of these cycles.
I wish less was wasted – time, material, energy. I wish sky-burial
could happen in Texas as well as Tibet. I’m happy that Sleazy’s
shell will be treated in accordance with his wishes in Thailand.
It is my dream that one day, we will all be able to complete that
cycle with our bodies, and feed something else with what we
leave behind. Our systems for dealing with death, and our grief
and burial rituals severely need massive restructuring, and soon.

Thanksgiving feast for a lone butterfly…

…and also for me!

I love how persimmon trees look festooned with bright ornaments on cold days.

Despite what might seem like morose maunderings, my Thanksgiving was
remarkably sweet and filled with good company, and much comfort and joy.

I am extremely blessed to be able to celebrate Thanksgiving twice,
with two amazing families – (both my own, and Colin’s) and to be
able to enjoy caffè corretto alla grappa and discussions about nuclear
physics in the parlour with Colin’s papa, and stay up until 3am talking
about everything under the sun with his mama. They are so lovely.
My own folks also just blow me away with their strength and positivity -
my dad’s dealing with chemotherapy right now, and he’s been taking
it all in stride and maintaining his jovial nature. Send him a good wish,
won’t you? He’d be very grateful to you. I am so thankful to be a part
of such good families, and to be surrounded by so many amazing
friends. I love my life. I am so glad I chose it, and that I get to share it.
Thank you for reading, thank you for being a part of it. Goodnight!

Related posts:
Huexoloti Honey
Russet + Bone
Lone Grove Lullaby

Eulogies for Sleazy:
From Coilhouse – So Long, Sleazy
From John Coulthart – Peter Christopherson, 1955–2010

Our latest party is nigh…
TRANARCHY!
October 2nd – 10pm until.. ?
at The ND (The Independent)
501 Brushy & East 5th

A night of dancing and performances from
drag kings, queens and everything in between!
featuring performances by:
Kings n’ Things
Miz Chlamydia Burns
Sym Prole debuting
as Merci Killingspree
Mizarre
2 Left Feet
Anthony F.
DJ Chicken Kiev
DJ Chainsaw Hammell
Will Glitterbeast & The Tranarchy Gogo Dancers!

Transformation Station from Coco Coquette
Photobooth from Fun Lovin’ Photos!
Projections by RECSPEC

$7 – Dressed to transgress!
$10 – Bored us to death…

Looking for inspiration? Look no further than the
latest incarnation of Pearls Over Shanghai!
I had the opportunity to see it while I was in
San Francisco recently, and it was such a
joy. Marvelous cast, wonderful costumes
and music – I loved every second of it.
If you get a chance, the run has been
extended through December 19th,
so go! I really cannot implore you enough,
and if this doesn’t convince you, I don’t know
what will. Really now, see here:

“Pearls Over Shanghai,” an original musical by Link Martin and
Richard “Scrumbly” Koldewyn, is the centerpiece of our second
annual Theatre of the Ridiculous Revival, and marks the 40th
anniversary of the formation of The Cockettes, a gender-bending
theatrical troupe who not only originated this show, but also exerted
a profound influence on the culture of our times, from the phenomenon
of midnight movies to glitter rock stars and their outrageous fashions.
Based loosely on John Colton’s scandalous 1926 Broadway play
“The Shanghai Gesture” (later transformed into a deliriously decadent
art deco film noir by Josef von Sternberg in 1941), “Pearls Over Shanghai”
is a comic mock-operetta about white slavery and miscegenation set in the
colorful world of 1937 Shanghai, China. Link Martin parts the bamboo curtain,
his politics swept aside by his love of the mystery and intrigue of the Orient.
Placing his story at the crossroads of good and evil, his exotic “old sin town”
is filled with singing sailors, witty whores, foolish immortals, handmaidens
and henchmen, all taking their places in streets teeming with a mix of
foreign aristocrats, opium addicts, and gangland slave-trade czars.

We had the very good fortune of stumbling upon original Cockettes
member, the legendary Rumi Missabu having a smoke and preparing
for her role as Madame Gin-Sling. What a treat! Rumi is an utter delight
– very gracious and charming, with golden talons and mighty bosoms.

The light was slowly leaching into duskiness, but I managed to get in
a few good ones. The full set is here: Cockettes – Pearls Over Shanghai

Ah, Lili Frustrata! Played by (I believe) Eric Wertz, who utterly
captivated me with the song “Apples and Wontons” So divine.

Lili’s paramour was played by a dear and long-lost friend from
New Orleans, Flynn DeMarco, who also plays a mean ukulele!

Beautiful Jean, who kindly rescued my favorite earring from the asphalt.

Shanghai hookers! Love their macquillage! Fringe beards for life!

Truly not to be missed, folks. An adorable little
old gay grampa whispered to me after the show,
“I was there for the the original Cockettes performance
of this show, and well – I thought this was even better!”
It’s true, I guess I was expecting everyone to be on acid
and ad-libbing their lines and falling off the stage (like it
used to be!) We thought it would be loads of fun, but not
necessarily good, you know? Well! They showed us, no?

If you’re still craving more, here’s a passel of videos to get you going:

If you still haven’t seen the Cockettes documentary, please get that sorted
out immediately! It’s very illuminating. The trailer is a bit skippy, alas.

A video of make-up stills from various performances. These are a bit old,
(the make-up’s actually far better now), but good for inspiration!

Oh, Hibiscus – resplendent in Les Ghouls!

An enjoyable snippet.

I had tried, on multiple occasions, to watch 3 Women – knowing instinctively
that I would love it, though I hadn’t yet seen many of Robert Altman’s films.
Something always went wrong. The disc had a flaw, and froze up, or everyone
had already seen it too many times. Finally, I gave it another try, and watched
it by myself one sweltering afternoon a couple weeks ago. I knew even watching
the opening credits, with the strange and watery montage of monstrous murals
that it would be one of my all-time favorite films. It really is incredible. I think I
need to own my own copy! I’ve never sat through the entire director’s commentary
on a film before, but this was that sensation when you finish an amazing book,
and just have the urge to turn it over and start reading it again, from the beginning.
The story of how the idea for the film came to Altman in a dream, fully formed and
cast, is so fascinating. I admire both Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek utterly – as
immensely talented actresses, outrageously beautiful women, and as fellow Texans!

They both put so much into their roles as Millie Lammoreaux and Pinky Rose, both characters
feel absolutely authentic in their oddness. Their accents are as familiar and sweet as milk
to me, and Sissy has always secretly reminded me of my mom (who was a red-headed
Texan also nicknamed Cissie). I was watching Inside the Actor’s Studio with Sissy Spacek
today, and I love how she says, “You know, being from Texas is like being a member of a
very exclusive club.” She’s right, too! We always seem to find each other, and have a very
particular understanding for one another, and also – an innate friendliness. We’re not earnest
like Canadians, but just very open, somehow. I love being from here, I must say. If I had a pair
of Texas-shaped sunglasses, I’d wear ‘em every day. I know they exist out there, somewhere!
What other state has sunglasses made in the shape of it, I ask you? None! Texas rules, man.

Janice Rule, who plays Willie Hart, also fascinates me. Witch-blue eyes staring ruefully, silent
in long skirts and straw hat. Always painting these bizarrely gorgeous murals on the walls of
drained swimming pools. Heavily pregnant, crouched with her brushes and pots in the hot sun.
She knows things, ancient mysteries, but she’s not saying. She watches, and paints, and carries
a deep sadness. The sorrow of the mother of the world. She’s a primordial crone-queen.

Bodhi Wind was the actual artist who painted the strange and savage murals,
and unfortunately, very little is known about him. He was incredibly talented artist,
a symbolist visionary, and something of a babe! Sadly, I discovered that four or
five years after 3 Women was made, he stepped off a curb in London and was
struck and killed by an oncoming car. I’ve found myself wondering about who
Bodhi Wind was, and where the inspiration for his beautiful beasts came from.
What wonders might he have created had he lived? I’ve also been thinking a
lot about the 1970′s – and all the brilliant drifters that simply wandered off the
horizon into oblivion. What did they leave behind? In an era before people
could simply be googled and found, you could just disappear, and leave no
trace. I wonder about the murals in the desert. Did they flake away, or get
painted over? Are they still out there, preserved in the pool of the Purple Sage
apartment complex, or hacked off the walls to grace the dining room of some
Hollywood luminary? I wish I knew. It seems he also did the cover art for the
album Elevation from jazz great Pharoah Sanders. That’s all I could dig up,
alas. But who knows? There’s got to be some people out there who knew him,
who worked with him, who knew what his name was before he became Bodhi Wind.

Altman said it was so hot in the desert, that they couldn’t paint during the day –
the paint would literally boil and bubble. They had to wait until evening, and
drag lights down into the empty pools to paint by. Can you imagine?

This was his assistant, his friend, maze-painter. Who was he? Where is he these days?

I would have loved to have seen books of Bodhi’s paintings, galleries filled
with his mystic monsters. How would he have evolved as an artist? Mysteries.

I’ve been devouring Joan Didion’s collection Slouching Towards Bethelehem,
and the first passage in the first essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”
seemed so apt, seemed to perfectly describe the setting, and the rootlessness
of 3 Women. I’d never read Didion before, but I’ve got a stack I’m working through.

“This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.
The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by way of the San
Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California
of subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California,
haunted by the Mohave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana
wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the
Eucalypts windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind,
the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously.
There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream.
It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else,
for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.
Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the
only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.”
– From the essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”

Also, do please check out Going Home – a great essay by Kari Amick
for Wundkammer Magazine on Joan Didion, cranes, and the difficulty of going home.

“Whooping cranes are white birds, five feet tall, and graceful where they should be ungainly.
Like loons, cranes raise only one or two chicks per year. Unlike loons, cranes are endangered
enough to merit captive rearing to supplement their numbers. The trick to raising birds in captivity
is to look and sound like them, to stay silent and play crane calls through an mp3 player, to swaddle
one’s self in a white sheet with one gloved hand marked to look like a crane’s head: red forehead patch,
yellow eye, long black beak. Then when the cranes are introduced to other cranes they will migrate with
them, they will mate with them, they will not know that the difference between the misshapen thing that
raised them and the real bird they see now. They will follow the crane flock home.”

Man, I need to watch Coal Miner’s Daughter again! Badlands, also which
3 Women joins at the very tip-top of my all-time favorite films canon.

Sissy Spacek Interviewed for 3 Women at Cannes – she’s so elfin and perfect!
Look at her corn-flax hair, and that crisp blazer and her enthusiastic ease.

I grabbed all the best stills I could find for this post, with many thanks to
Miss Moodboard, Mister Ron’s Log, and John Waterson for making them available!
Also, check out Corbu’s Cave – The Painted Wall: From Cave Painting
to Le Corbusier and Beyond for a nice piece on Bodhi.

Unrelated, save for their hues and beauty – some dewy sweet peas from Ecstaticist:

Woman with Cross and Skull
19th c. – Qajar period, Iran
Opaque watercolor and gold on paper

Mistick Krewe of Comus float design, by Jennie Wilde — 1910
(see link below for the full set!)

(Any idea about who painted this? Tin Eye was stumped.
I traced it back toblessedwildapplegirl but the buck stopped there.)

✸ Bibiodyssey’s post on vintage Mardi Gras Designs
Mistick Krewe of Comus 1910 float designs
of float design drawings by Jennie Wilde
browse them all at the Louisiana Research Collection
I remember at French Quarter Postal Emporium they used to sell little postcard books of these.
I was always too broke to buy them, so would look at them when standing in line waiting to mail
my parcels, much to the chagrin of the fussy queens who worked there.

✸ I think I’ve mentioned my love for Shirley & Spinoza Radio before,
but it’s been awhile. I had forgotten how much I loved them. How could I?
They play the best, oddest and most obscure scraps of brilliance ever.

✸ Academy Award-nominated actress and Austin artist Susan Tyrrell loves sex, fags and gangsta rap.
Hooray for Susu Tyrrell, and hooray for my friend Chris Apollo Lynn, who interviewed her.

This article on the temptation of memory engineering is extremely absorbing:
✸ Removable Truths – A memory expert’s indestructible past.
By William Saletan
Reading it has made me fixate on our fallible and flexible memories. I recently
had an odd experience, where I realized that I had vividly remembered something
(the color, make and model of a friend’s car) that turned out to be wildly inaccurate.
It’s disturbing to think about, really. How could I remember it to be a burgundy Chevy
hoopty when it was really a white Mercedes diesel? I guess it was dark, and I was very
distracted – but really? That’s kind of a huge discrepancy. I was shocked to discover it.
Thanks to William Gibson for recommending this article, among many other things-
and speaking of, for the following recommendations as well:

✸ William Gibson’s favorite science fiction novels
I haven’t read a single one of these, though Wiley Wiggins did try to foist
Dhalgren on me years ago. Gibson says, “It won’t work unless you can allow
it to become your head for a few weeks; it helps if you’re rather young.” I think
I was too jaded by that point to really get into it. I’d discovered early on what my
bag was as far as science fiction went, from devouring my dad’s 70′s pulp paperbacks.
I tend not to dig anything where the characters are named Zorn or live on planet Xerzon.
The incredible images on the covers definitely made a huge impression on me, though.
I think I’ll need to see if my pops has any of the books on that list, and get my summer
space-sorceror escapist thing going. How about you? Got any favorite science fiction
I need to read? Lay it on me. We’re getting a new hammock tomorrow, so I need book-fuel!

✸ I just went on a bookspree and snatched up seven new books
but I absolutely must get this one next – it looks amazing:
CYCLONOPEDIA – Complicity with Anonymous Materials
By Reza Negarestani

“An American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous
online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room,
she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether
her friend was a fictional quantity all along. Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US
is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure,
and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert,
seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil …

At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat
and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror
is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world
politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth
itself. Cyclonopedia is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers,
Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld
begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last
unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth’s tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.”

✸ Burkas and Birkins -
I Watched 146 Minutes of Sex and the City 2 and All I Got Was This Religious Fundamentalism by Lindy West
This is so goddamn hilarious – and I’m so grateful to Lindy for seeing this awful bit o’ tripe
so I don’t have to! I still have never seen even one episode of that show, and an entire film
based on it sounds completely intolerable. I do love pretty frippery and all, but whoa. Scary!

✸ Pamela Colman Smith’s Russian Ballet
Pixie Smith is my number one magicienne inspiration.
She’s at the head of the invite list for my fantasy seance
dinner party, along with Joseph Cornell, Edward Gorey,
Louise Brooks, Vali Myers, and Austin Osman Spare.
Who would you invite to yours?

✸ Why are the East of Cities usually Poorer?
(via the always kick-ass from Brainpickings)
Interesting! I’d always wondered about this.

✸ Honeybee death mystery deepens
Colony collapse disorder linked to mix of fungal and viral infections.
A good article with actual information rather than hysteria. Don’t get me
wrong – I am worried about the bees every day, but having any clues as
to what is actually ailing them is the only way we can setting about changing
that. I can’t wait for the day when I can start to set up my hives. Honey magic!

✸ Post Pridematic Stress Syndrome – Shaking out Austin’s weekend of Pride
Here’s the run-down of articles, info and tantalizing tidbits from Pride,
including the entire text of Silky Shoemaker’s stunning speech at Queerbomb!

My dear friend Ooops is an amazing aerial artist who recently choreographed
and performed this piece as an homage to our friend Noah Vasilchek.
With Niki Frisky as her deer-twin, and the inimitable Chris Lane as emcee, and a bunch of
rowdies at One Eyed Jacks hootin’ and hollerin’. This is one of my favorite aerial performances, ever.

That’s what’s floatin’ around the rusty brainpan of late!
If you’ve got any suggestions for books/music/art/culture/information
that I need to know about, drop me a line on my tin can telephone.
I’ll be hanging out with the reading in my cave by the river with the
skulls of obscure saints to keep me company. Passenger pigeons
or smoke signals are accepted also, and if you travel in dreams,
come say hello. I get around most nights, more than I would’ve
guessed – but judging from how often I seem to pop up in the
dreams of friends and future friends, it seems I’m a nightly roamer.