Dead birds, dead fish, dead dolphins, dead people.
This is what I’ve been having bad dreams about,
the heavy weight pressing down on my chest for
almost half a year now. It’s been about five months
since Deepwater Horizon blew, and now this one.
How many more will falter under some fatal error,
and further poison the Gulf with crude? Man, I’ve
been quiet about it for a little while now because
no way around it – this is just beyond depressing,
beyond heartbreaking. The cover-ups and media
blackouts designed to keep our eyes trained on
a bright horizon festooned with dazzling drivel,
the shambling of celebrity trainwrecks infinitely
more intriguing than a bunch of oily birds, or sad
fishermen, or ruined beaches. But all this time,
I’ve been silently doing what I always do when
I don’t know what else to do: I sift information.
I collect snippets, I read everything I can, I
make long lists. I obsess, because if I don’t,
the deep sorrow at what we are doing to this
earth starts to make me feel like I want to lay
down and never get up. Instead, I keep my eyes
open. I look and look until I can’t anymore, and
then I try and go find some beauty in this world.
I look at that instead, I share it here – but it’s not
enough. I have to share these things, and I hope
that you’ll look too. This is what’s happening, my
friends. Everyday it gets closer, so if you reckon
it’s just not part of your immediate reality – well,
just wait. At some point, it will be. Maybe when we
all have to wear masks or respirators just to go
outside? Maybe then. Maybe not. Anyway, this
is all the stuff I’ve been reading since April –
some of it hopefully you’ve seen already,
but if not, take some time to go through even
a little of the links below. If you get through
them all, you deserve a major treat – maybe
a banana split! Seriously. I know it’s overload,
but I have to share all this stuff. It’s all out there,
but it’s so easy just to go to the next thing. Isn’t it?

✸ The Gulf’s Other Time Bombs
The spider web of gas pipelines lurking under the Gulf.

✸ New Photos and Flyover of Mariner Platform

“Pilot Schumaker has been documenting the aftermath
of the BP Deepwater Horizon Macondo wellhead explosion
since May. Reached this evening for comment, Schumaker said,

Along the way, as we arrived at blue water, we saw three distinct
large pods (20-30 individuals) of gold-colored rays, and a large school
(25-30 individuals) of bottlenose dolphins near them. All of these were
in a region with moderate amounts of fairly healthy-looking sargassum.

But Schumaker also said that the Gulf did not look healthy as she flew to the platform.

Prior to reaching blue water, the first 50 miles off shore are a very strange
thick milky green with some strange black streaks spread throughout, with no
healthy sargassum and no signs of life. Where there is still blue water, and there
are many such places, there typically are bottlenose dolphins and good sargassum.
The rays were a welcome sight for sure, though, as I have not seen those within
75 miles of shore for nearly two months now.

All the more reason that media should not abandon the Gulf of Mexico just yet.”

✸ With Neighbors Unaware, Toxic Spill at a BP Plant

✸ ProPublica: BP Texas Refinery Had Huge Toxic Release Just Before Gulf Blowout

✸ Gulf Seafood Gets Chemically Tested for Oil, Not Dispersant

✸ Mycoremediation and Its Applications to Oil Spills

✸ Gulf Oil Plume Is Not Breaking Down Fast, Research Says

✸ The BP oil disaster “that never materialised”

✸ BP Spill: Catastrophe, Sure. Disaster? Nah.
“Given the size and far-reaching devastation of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill,
you may have assumed that it qualifies as a federal disaster.
Though you’d have been wrong, you wouldn’t have been alone.”
— By Mac McClelland

“Since May, Catholic Charities of New Orleans has been delivering more than
$100,000 worth of emergency grocery and bill assistance; last week, the organization
announced that it’s out of money. “Right now we have people standing in food lines,”
says Costanza. ‘If this were a federal disaster, we’d get disaster food stamps. We’d
get disaster case management. Disaster mental health. Disaster unemployment.’
The Stafford Act would also activate an interagency task force that includes the
American Red Cross, which so far, Costanza says, ‘didn’t raise a dime.
Neither did the Salvation Army.’

The fate of the fishermen rendered unemployed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill
suggests the devastation that can occur in the absence of federal aid. Victims
were ultimately able to extract $1.1 billion in compensation from the company,
but only after 19 years of litigation. ‘A lot of them are dead, or bankrupt, or divorced,’
says Brian O’Neill, the lawyer who tried the case. ‘The impact of the spill on both the
natural environment and their abilities to make a living resulted in huge social disruption
in the fishing communities. There were increased rates of alcoholism, domestic violence.
Whatever social services existed were unable to handle it. Some communities didn’t survive
or are half the size they were in 1988. Whatever assistance BP is giving these people now,
that will taper off drastically when this is off the front page.’”

✸ The BP Cover-Up
— By Julia Whitty

“No one is ready for it. Not the Minerals Management Service, catering submissively
to BP’s laughable Gulf oil-spill ‘plan,’ a document featuring wildly inaccurate wildlife
assessments (including walruses and other species nonexistent in the Gulf)
and an on-call expert who’s been dead for years.”

✸ Kindra Arnesen speaks out
This woman is my new hero. Please listen to what she has to say.

✸ You Are Not Authorized to See These Pictures of the Oil Spill, Citizen … Do Not Look!

✸ Spill Photogs Could Face Felony Charges Under New Coast Guard Directive

“In a blog post over the weekend, journalist Georgianne Nienaber argued
that this new regulation effectively prevents photographers from getting near
affected areas. ‘If the Coast Guard has its way, all media, not just independent
writers and photographers… will be fined $40,000 and receive Class D felony
convictions for providing the truth about oiled birds and dolphins, in addition to
broken, filthy, unmanned boom material that is trapping oil in the marshlands
and estuaries. One to five years in prison is a definite possibility for ‘willful violation’
of the latest Coast Guard directive that flies in the face of the First Amendment.
And, I guarantee you that writers and photographers will continue to try our best
to use cameras and words to explain to those who have not been there exactly
what is happening on our Gulf Shores. If we don’t continue to try, Americans will
no longer see the images and read the words that have been a voice for the
voiceless fishermen and women, coastal residents of the Delta, and the battered wildlife.”
– Georgianne Nienaber
Haiti relief worker, investigative journalist,
author of Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian Fossey
(and my other new hero)

✸ Trouble Down Below
Much of the spill’s damage will play out in the ocean’s deepest layers.

✸ Are We Losing Interest in the Oil Spill?

✸ BP board game foreshadows Gulf disaster

✸ Visual Guides to Sustainable Seafood

✸ The week in seafood: shortages and high prices put customers and restaurants on alert

✸ Organic Produce Cheatsheet from My Paper Crane
(Might as well include this too! It’s quite useful.)

✸ Top New Orleans chef sues BP over seafood losses

“Susan Spicer, one of New Orleans’ most prominent and highly regarded chefs,
has sued BP Plc for damages to restaurants that have lost normal seafood supplies
because of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. ‘I just hope that my motivations will not be misinterpreted,’
she said from her restaurant Bayona in her first interview since the suit was filed Friday.
‘It’s more about solidarity in this region than about getting my piece of the pie.
I can’t say I expect to see a dollar out of this thing. I am just angry.’”

✸ BP’s Next Disaster

✸ Six Things To Do About the BP Gulf Disaster

✸ Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it
“The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines
around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta
have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades”
– John Vidal

“Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: ‘Oil companies do not value our life;
they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and
fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable.’”

✸ Why Are Indian Farmers Committing Suicide?
by Vandana Shiva

“The factors that have caused 200,000 suicides in India are rooted
in the policies of trade liberalization and corporate globalization which
ensnare farmers in a spiral of indebtedness, generating despair.”

It’s all connected. We are all connected.

“It is no surprise that as the sea turns black in the gulf with no end in sight
in the midst of the biggest ecological disaster in US history, CocoRosie are
the only ones to hit the zeitgeist with an album filled with psychic omniscience,
entitled “Grey Oceans.” And yet it seems to be the album the indie US press
doesn’t want to talk about. Bianca and Sierra Casady paints pictures of lost
children across a broken land, feral, elemental spirits who roam the dreamscapes
of our world, naming perpetrators, painting their memories, recovering and reclaiming power.
They are unafraid to manifest their vision that the application of magical creativity could be a
balm for aching souls in a struggling world.”
- Antony Hegarty from Op-Ed: An Artists’
Dialogue On CocoRosie’s Grey Oceans

Something to heal your heart after all of that sadness:

CocoRosie – Lemonade
Maybe the best music video ever made.

“Journeying inward, into the forest-dark ember, led by crystal light,
the voicing of whales and ancient souls passed, we embarked;
slipping with muddy foothold, on a destination-less ride through
darkened waters filled with starry-eyed daughters. We have had
many guides, some dead ones, some alive, some sisters with names
pronounceable, others, just an inkling, the last heat of summer, seeping
up, out of the evening sunned soil in september. We close our eyes,
to hear the decoration, a burnt out corn field, a sad place to remember,
the story of a heartless crow, his countless cackles haunting, his mission,
misogyny. We dual waves, heavy laden with salt, of foisted female identity,
underlying, trinity is crying, she mourns so sweetly. Heavy on our hearts,
the weight of time; the earth who lost her balance
and fell into the snowy depths of industrial mucus.”
– CocoRosie

Thinking about the rain today. Another thunderstorm, and as I relish it, my poor old blind dog
is cowering at every rumble of thunder. He’s pacing, and has to be as close as possible to me
at all times. I pat him and reassure him, but he won’t really calm down until after the storm has
passed. I know how he feels. Back when I lived in New Orleans, rain meant something else to
me. Drought was something unthinkable in that city. Like clockwork, those muggy, tropical summer
afternoons would be punctuated halfway through by epic downpours. Those storms would somehow
always catch me on my bike, in the middle of the French Quarter, late for work again. The rain would
come at you sideways, and there was nothing you could do, except try and take cover under one of
the wide balconies or awnings, pulling the wooden shutters close around you to make a fort.
You were just going to get wet, no matter what, so you might as well take cover in a dim bar
with all the hapless tourists in plastic ponchos. Their cheap umbrellas would litter the banquette
outside – wrecked frames, inverted tulips in black and plaid, flipped inside out by huge gusts of wind.

(Photo by Mary-Jane Maybury )

I lived for about five years in a crumbling mansion on the corner of Bourbon and Esplanade.
It was the grandest place I’d ever lived in, and I was more than willing to put up with the fact
that it was literally falling apart because it was so incredibly beautiful as well as insanely cheap.
The apartment I had on the top floor was sprawling, ornate with double balconies and a crystal
chandelier in the bedroom. For a time, we slept on a futon mattress on the floor directly beneath
it, and would stare up for hours, transfixed by the cracks that radiated out from it like a glass wedding
cake on a crazed porcelain platter. I always laughed, saying that it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go –
done in by falling chandelier. After half the plaster in the other room came down over the guest bed,
narrowly missing my elderly cat, we decided to move the bed out of the way.

(Photo by Mary-Jane Maybury )

There were leaks in every room. Over the Italian marble fireplaces, in the kitchen, the parlor –
and most annoyingly, right over the toilet paper holder. I was so stubbornly in denial about the leaks,
that I insisted on keeping my things right where they belonged – as if the leaks would get the picture,
and one day seal up and move along. I kept an altar on the marble mantle, with all my most important
treasures – knowing full well that they’d just get soaked there. Roll after soggy roll of toilet-paper was
sacrificed to my inability to think of a better place to keep it. I’d have fits of anxiety whenever it started
to rain while I was traveling. I’d want to rush back home immediately and move all the important stuff
out of the way of all the indoor waterfalls. One night while I was in New York, it started to storm hard,
setting my heart to racing before I even knew why. I was already reaching for my phone to call home
and remind them to check on the leaks when it hit me that it might not be raining in New Orleans.

(Photo by Mary-Jane Maybury )

When the hurricanes got worse, storms changed for me. Growing up in Texas, I’d always loved a big,
bombastic thunderstorm. I loved the smell of it – heady metal, asphalt and ozone. I loved how fast the
sky could darken, the big sheets of water drenching the parched earth. Some branches might come down,
and you had to watch out for lightning, but that was it. The practice of boarding up windows and evacuating
before a storm was something new, and it wasn’t long before the onset of each new tropical depression or
incipient hurricane was enough to send me into a ripe panic. It was this that eventually chased me out of
New Orleans – the fear of packing, running, battening down the hatches from June to October. It was too
much. The last straw came with a tropical storm that hit New Orleans about a month before Katrina.
No one was making much a of a big deal about it – I caught some murmurings in Matassa’s grocery
store, but nobody was really stocking up. The old man at the front counter reminded me to bring my
stuff in off the balcony, and I wish I’d listened to him. Later that night the wind picked up, and started
tossing my potted plants around like missiles. Earlier that afternoon everyone was just calling Cindy
a tropical storm, but by the time she’d hit us she was classified as a category 1 hurricane. I wasn’t
expecting her strength, not at all. The cast-iron light fixtures that hung from chains on the covered
gallery were whipping around like medieval maces, all the glass smashed out. The big solid oaks
were tossing their limbs, suddenly horribly fluid, and seeming to be more water than wood.
My sweetheart at the time was out there somewhere, in the storm – on his way to come see me,
but it had been hours and I couldn’t imagine him out on his bike in that weather. Or worse, I could –
and did, horrified by images of him being brained by flying branches or debris, laying face-down
somewhere as the gutters filled up with mud. The power went out, and I didn’t even own a flashlight,
nor did I have any candles at the ready. I sat cowering in the dark, watching the storm and trying to
make call friends, but the lines were down. I didn’t have a television, didn’t play the radio, and I hadn’t
yet learned to become an addict of meteorology and storm-tracker websites. I felt so alone, and more
afraid of the weather than I had ever been before – the unexpected power of it, the sucker-punch.
Some hollering from down below rousted me from my brooding, and who but my sweet lover, clad
head to toe in yellow rain-gear, was calling up to me and struggling to lock his bike up in stinging gale.
I couldn’t fathom it, how he had made it to me, or that he had even tried – but man, was I grateful to see
him warm and safe and holed up under blankets in the dark, making me laugh. We made jokes about
the awful sounds coming from the roof. It sounded like it was about to blow off any minute, and little did
we know – it actually was. A month later, when Katrina hit, that’s exactly what happened. The big pieces
of copper that had been tacked down over the patchy roof of our nearly 200 year old house had just peeled
off and flown down the street. Our neighbors across the way stayed through it all, and said they watched the
pieces fly from their front window. I suppose some part of me knew it then, after Cindy, because as that next
morning dawned all calm and bright, I knew I had to go. Out of the blue, I decided I needed to get back to my
hometown. I couldn’t live with the constant threat of annihilation of my home, and all that I held dear. I made
the decision to leave New Orleans after the next Mardi Gras. My grandfather and I went on a trip to Serbia,
Greece and Spain for the whole next month, and two days after my arrival back home – Katrina hit.

I evacuated with my unpacked bags of dirty traveling clothes, my mother’s violin, a box of photos
and my laptop. I went back a month later to salvage what I could from the wreckage, and moved to
Austin, Texas – the place where I was born and raised. I fell deeply in love with an dear friend, quite
unexpectedly – and we bought a house together, and planted an orchard of fruit trees, and a big garden.
I pay attention to the weather now like an old-timer, and I only feel anxiety when it doesn’t rain. The long
summer droughts here can be vicious, and I wish I didn’t know what it is to pray for even a drop. Standing
in the doorway this afternoon, watching the garden get soaked I was thinking about how good it is for us
further west to catch the outlying bands from the big storms in the Gulf, and feeling simultaneously guilty.
I’d never wish for a hurricane, especially now that the effects of a major storm could be so far beyond
catastrophic. How many fervent wishes and spells and prayers did I add to the well of voices chanting
the deluge away from us in Crescent City? Now I follow the ancient charms to bring water, fill the resevoirs.
Drop a stone, watch the ripples – this is living that adage directly, feeling the ripple dump right down on you,
wondering if it’s soiled with oil and Corexit. The Mississippi river changes between its head and its tail –
it sheds it’s skin like a snake halfway down, becomes thicker and clogged with poison. You can dip your
toe in it in Minnesota, but I can guarantee it’s not the same river you’d be crazy to touch in New Orleans.
When I lived there, I remember feeling awful for being so glad when a hurricane would hit Alabama
or Florida instead of Louisiana. I’m thinking about blessings and curses,
about living in such exciting times, and I’m thinking about the rain.

(Photo by Richelle Forsey)

“Last week i was in New Orleans and happened to spot the only ‘surviving’ Banksy in the city.
‘Rain Girl’ – ‘Apparently there was some kind of storm here a few years ago’, is the only one of
Banksy’s New Orleans pieces saved from Fred Radtkes’ aka the Gray Ghost paint roller.
It’s on the side of the Drop-In Center at 1428 Rampart St. and under a sheet of plexi-glass.
It is one of a dozen or so he created on/for/around the 3rd anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
If the home/building owners had a chance, they could have made a fortune from the Banksy
pieces (apparently they increased the property values by 75, 000 – 200,000 USD), instead a
moron with too much time on his hands covered them up. In October of 2008, said moron,
Fred Radtke finally went too far with his gray touch and defaced a comissioned mural on
the wall of 2930 Burgundy St. owned by Southern Waterproofing. According to the locals
he was fined and ordered to pay for the re-painting of the mural.
He should have been banned from purchasing paint.”
– Richelle Forsey

✸ From Democracy Now: all their coverage on Hurricane Katrina over the past five years.

✸ William Gibson on “New Orleans: The City They Couldn’t Disneyland”

✸ Katrina “Survivors” versus “Internally Displaced Persons” More Than Mere Semantics
(Thanks to Clayton Cubitt for this one.)

✸ Sticking a Happy Face on Katrina
— By Mac McClelland, who is my newest hero. She saw Obama speak in New Orleans
for the Katrina Anniversary the other day, and had this to say:
“Obama: ‘No need to dwell on what you all experienced during Katrina.’
Beg to differ, Mr. President. Lest the govt let that happen again.”

✸ Post-Katrina, Graffiti Said It All

✸ Traces Of Katrina: New Orleans Suicide Rate Still Up

✸ Finally unpacking boxes, feeling at home: A guest column by Louis Maistros

“But recovery? The word feels good in my ear, the sound of it nearly redeeming —
but it doesn’t entirely ring true. What happened to us in the summer of 2005 isn’t
something you recover from. It’s something that you stand up to if you’re able,
and it’s something you may conspire to defy if you choose — but you never really
recover from it. In the beginning we dreamed of being whole again and so marched
blindly in the direction of that dream, never really knowing how the story would resolve,
or even if it could resolve. We’re still on that road and still can’t say for sure where it will
take us, but we have to believe it’ll be someplace better.

The Katrina experience was a rude thing that dared to define each of us without our
permission. It changed who we are, informed who we’ll be, and altered our perception
of where we came from. Pre-Katrina life has become a thing of nostalgia, like Elvis Presley
and sock hops, not quite real anymore but ever-precious in our hearts. Many years from now
our grandchildren will ask us in wide-eyed wonder about it all — and we’ll tell. And then we’ll
go on about our recovery even as the wetness of our eyes contradicts the words on our lips.”
– Louis Maistros

(Photo by Tony Allen-Mills)

If you’ve still got it in you, here’s some collected writings
about my experiences with Hurricane Katrina,
in reverse chronological order. Dig in:

✸ Hurricane Katrina: Four Years Later

✸ New Orleans in August

✸ One Year

✸ Lower Ninth Aftermath

✸ MARDI GRAS APRÈS L’ORAGE

✸ AFTERMATH: REVELATIONS

✸ JUST WHEN YOU THINK IT CAN’T GET ANY WORSE

✸ Calamity

✸ The Triumph of Death

✸ What can you do?

✸ Katrina

I promised I would write about my deep love for Nita and Zita
a while back, and as these mysterious ladies have been
haunting my dreams and acting as my muses lately, I
reckon I had better share their story here. I remember
first discovering the magic of these bohemian legends
at Judy’s Collage, an amazing junk-haven that used to
be on Chartres and Frenchmen. Man, I miss that place!
It was so packed with the most incredible stuff, you could
barely move around. Stalactites of flotsam hung from the
ceiling in a dimly lit mermaid’s cavern crammed with
jettisoned treasures. There was an odd little corner with
some of Nita and Zita’s costumes stuck on old mannequins
in kind of a chicken wire shrine. There were so many
fascinating characters in the Marigny and Bywater,
burlesque dancers and faded old queens with creole
cottages brimming with old photos and stories – I was
very blessed to meet and become friends with some of
them, and hear their stories. But oh! What I wouldn’t have
given to have been able to meet Nita and Zita! How
wonderful to have visited them in their amazing polka-dot
house, and taken dance and exercise classes from them!
It hurts my heart to think of them being buried in pauper’s
graves with only the Rabbi and a neighbor come to pay
their respects! It kills me to think of them so friendless,
when now their old neighborhood is full of people who
revere their memories, write plays based on their lives,
and fight over their tattered belongings and who loved
them best. Flora and Piroska Gellért were born in the
Jewish shtetl of Nagybánya, Hungary – which apparently
is close to Szatmárnémeti (now you know!) They immigrated
to America in 1922 to become Nita and Zita, exotic dancers
and acrobats of international renown. They traveled and
performed all over the world, their passports a patchwork
of stamps from Shanghai, Panama, Paris and Egypt.

“Nita and Zita were sisters. They were also exotic
or interpretive dancers (‘Hawaiian, Oriental, waltz,
veil dances,’ reads one of their old cards), and they
spent their last years in a small shotgun
house on Dauphine Street.

Nita and Zita had come originally from Romania (Hungary!)
and were often referred to in their old New Orleans neighborhood
as ‘The Gypsy Ladies.’ They danced on Bourbon Street toward the
end of their careers and gave dance and fitness lessons in one room
of their home: ‘Nita and Zita International Dancers. Health exercise
studio for 25 years till 60 years old persons for body and mind
improvment. Everybody need to exercise but persons in their
middle years need mild and slow exercises to have normal
blood circulation.’ How true. How very true.”

- From VOICES, The annual report of the North Carolina
Folk Art Society, Vol. 1: 1992. By Howard Campbell

This is Piroska (Zita) Gellért. Piroska (Pir-osh-ka) is the Hungarian name for Little Red Riding Hood.

While I was in the midst of writing this, I received an email from my
dear friend in New Orleans, the inimitable Marquis Déjà Dû, which
included this amazing video from 1922 (the year the sisters came
to America!) showing the belles of the day posing and preening
in glorious color! I was just conversing with my sweetheart on how
odd it is to see these rare images the pre-technicolor era – we were
amazed by the photos from Russia in Color, a Century Ago. We
were musing on about how strangely shocking it is to
see color photographs from that time. It makes it all seem
so much closer, more real somehow, and – although
we know better, it’s easy to think of the world as being all
black and white back then. How odd, to see the blue of
an eye, the blush of a cheek. It shouldn’t be, but it is!

(Photograph from FLY)

Sort of unrelated, but still – my friend Masha Yakovenko is a model
in New York, and I just stumbled across this photo of her that I think
is just so exquisite. Doesn’t she look like a Louise Brooks sort of girl?
I think she would look amazing in one of Nita + Zita’s dresses like
this one that was being sold by Paisley Babylon a while back:

I love the hand stitching on these. I remember seeing the
famous portraits of Nita and Zita decorating Paisley
Babylon, which was such fabulous vintage store that
used to be on Decatur Street, but now exists only online –
I wonder if she’ll ever put up any more of Nita and Zita’s
fabulous wardrobe? I can only wish and dream!

Not that I could have filled this frock out! Va-va-va-voom! Bazongas!

“I don’t know all the facts of Nita & Zita’s life (nobody does, really;
they have become mythic), but have pieced together a history
from the designs that they left behind. They were real bohemians:
they lived art, did everything in an artistic manner. They even repaired
their ramshackle Marigny home with needle and thread, sewing up
holes in the walls! Same with their clothing: they made and mended
them. In fact, it seems like they made nearly all of their dresses by
hand, or redesigned store-bought dresses, and would continue to
work on them until they were perfect! Sort of like those crafty hippies
did with their jeans! Embroidery is very Hungarian!
Dancers, contortionists, folk artists, above all Nita and Zita were seamstresses!”
– Paisley Babylon

Brings to mind the new project from the lovely trans-continental
ladies, Drucilla & Mathyld, who are debuting Ragtime Seance,
“Part e-course, part secret club”, joining their forces to teach us
about embroidery and sewing! They are drawing inspiration
from the flappers of the 1920′s, so hopefully Saints Nita + Zita
will bless and inspire their endeavors! Sok szerencsét kivánok!
(A légpárnás hajóm tele van angolnákkal!)

This is Annie. Isn’t she adorable? I love her a lot.
She is wearing a Metallica shirt and is covered in bees. This makes me love her even more.

A golden eagle, little puppet, and globe lamps.

I love this antler lady sculpture. I’m not sure who made it, though! An etsy-seller, I believe.

Doll-babies and a skeleton hand that I’ve seen Annie wear on her head as a fascinator.

More tinies.

I am very covetous of this Balinese headdress that Annie found at the bins for a buck and quarter!
(If you are not a fan of North America’s only marsupial, please do not look at the last photo!)

This is the famous Halloween hat that I adore. I wish she’d wear it all the time.

See also:
Feral Honey
and
Nectarine Dream

★ I love Arthur Magazine – they always turn me on to the best stuff, and write about a lot
of my favorite people, places and things that no one else seems to know about. Right now
I’m really loving this work from Mexico City artist Inés Estrada. How to find a witch in a ball
of yarn! I’ve always wondered how to do that. A very useful manual indeed! She is also
also co-editor of the bilingual comic anthology Gang Bang Bong, which looks super.
I’ve decided to commit (finally!) and stop flirting with the handful of languages that
I know enough of to be cute in. Spanish needs to get in my brain, and come out my
mouth, because I’m tired of feeling embarrassed that I can’t have a simple conversation
about dogs or the weather with my neighbors. Well, honestly, I can – but I sound like
a demented child. Not so good! What better way to learn a language than by reading
comics, or poetry? Nice to read Pablo Neruda aloud at night, and dance in front of the
mirror – or so I hear from a certain bruja who lives down the street! Cha-cha-cha!
Oh yes, and – check this great page out: Beyond Rosetta Stone – 20 free online
resources for learning a foreign language – can’t wait to delve in! ¡Estoy listo!

★ I am so taken with the work of Trine Søndergaard. What an inspiration.
They are severe, yet elfin – archaic and very modern all at once. Love!

On and Off the Walls: Trine Søndergaard’s Fano Portraits

(Thanks to Mlle. Odette O. for this, and for the following!)

“For a period of the three years Trine Søndergaard visited the Danish island of Fano
to take portraits of local women dressed up in their traditional costumes. On this northern
island, the costumes are somber, with only a dash of color. Søndergaard’s portraits are
luminous and of a simple beauty. Her subjects pose in their regalia, the background is
neutral, the light is pure, and the composition is classical.”
– Elisabeth Biondi

I once spent the 4th of July in a small village in Denmark called Skørping,
in the Rebild National Forest. Why? Well, my grandfather thought it was
interesting that they have celebrated America’s Independence Day since
1912. It’s the largest 4th of July celebration outside the U.S. and people
come from all over to sit on bleachers in the Danish summer drizzle and
listen to the Queen of Denmark. I instead went hiking in the forest, chased
some sheep, slid down a hill in the rain, and listened to the surreal sound
of the Maritime Band playing “In the Mood” and other swing hits reverberating
off of the pines. There is also a full-size reproduction of Abraham Lincoln’s
log cabin and a totem pole in the park. What? So bizarre. Anyhow, the very
best part for me was seeing the most adorable little old people in traditional
Danish folk-costumes. They look like elves! I want to dress like that when I
am old. Pointy hats with embroidered flowers and big red bows, please!

★ Ryan McGinley takes lots of pictures of androgynously beautiful young people,
cavorting naked in nature. Sounds kind of daft and done, but I really like what
he does. It’s spontaneous and mystic and makes you want to be there.
I especially like his series moonmilk, which is naked people in lovely caves.

10 Awesome Caves Of the World
★ I’ve been on a cave trip lately. There are so many I want to explore one day,
particularly this one in Croatia: “The Velebit Mountain is the home of a number
of caves named Lukina jama, Slovacka jama, Velebita and Meduza. These caves
have some of the world’s greatest subterranean spectacular vertical drops, sure to
bring a shudder in the spine. At the foot of Lukina jama there are ponds and streams
having the largest colonies of subterranean leeches.”

★ The Brooklyn based street art collective Faile has made this incredible temple
in Lisbon, that I want very badly to see in person. How wonderful it is! I love the
mish-mash of typefaces and cultural references, and it tickles me to imagine
the bewilderment of future archaeologists when they find this peculiar monument!

“Known for adapting its signature mass culture-driven iconography
to a wide array of media, from wooden boxes and window pallets
to more traditional canvas, prints, sculptures, stencils, multimedia
installation, and prayer wheels, Faile blurs the lines between commodity
and art, and ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, demonstrating a emphasis on audience
participation, a sharpened critique of consumerism, and attempts to develop
new forms of religious artifact. Situated smack right in the middle of one of
the busiest streets of Lisbon and surrounded by classical buildings with
history of its own, the temple is a giant sculptural installation that has been
2 years in the making. Shaped somewhat like a dilapidated mausoleum,
the temple has everything you can imagine from a armed warrior horse,
to Indian themed graffitis, to columns and totems inspired by pop culture.”
- From Wicked Halo

More great photos at the great Portugeuse Street Art blog Stick 2 Target also!

★ My favorite theatre company in Austin is mounting a new show in October,
which I can’t wait to see: Rubber Repertory,
in association with Salvage Vanguard Theater,
proudly presents:
BIOGRAPHY OF PHYSICAL SENSATION

“In their first new show since The Casket of Passing Fancy,
Rubber Repertory pushes the limits of audience participation
to even more fateful extremes. Each night, an audience of 40
will be given the chance to experience a human life through
actual tastes, touches, smells, and sounds. This reinvention
of the traditional biography forgoes narrative in favor of pure
physical experience, placing audience members in the center
of over a hundred pivotal moments of perception.

Once the show begins, it’s a fast and feely ride through puberty
and pork chops, gunshots and tetherball, party whistles and old
pianos, tonsillectomies and lemon cake. In other words: life itself.”
Doesn’t that sound great? I love what they do. Oh, and if you
buy tickets now, you’ll get a special prize! It will probably be smelly!

★ Candied Corpses, And 87 Other Ancient Innovations
I desperately need Vicki Leon’s new book, How to Mellify a Corpse:
And Other Human Stories of Ancient Science & Superstition.

★ I’m also craving Cockney Visionary
lavishly illustrated monograph to accompany
the Austin Osman Spare exhibition in London.
Quite beyond my range at £160, alas!

★ I did treat myself recently, when I decided
that I couldn’t live without The Fantastic Menagerie
Tarot published by The Magic Realist Press.

“Lively, humorous and utterly engaging,
The Fantastic Menagerie Tarot is based
on the illustrations of 19th century French illustrator,
J.J. Grandville. Known as the “Father of Surrealism”.
Grandville was a huge influence on artists such as
Tenniel, the first illustrator of Alice in Wonderland.
His pictures are cynical, funny, bitter and sweet –
and make for a deck that manages to be both timeless and true.”

★ I’m really adoring this very sweet and generous blog
from collectors of Western Swing 78s – they share
a lot of this really hard-to-find music, which is the
perfect soundtrack to cooking lima beans on a
hot August night. Believe me, because I know.

★ Did anyone catch the Perseid Meteor Shower the
other night? We watched a bit, though we were still
too close to civilization for it to be very dark. Still, it
was divine: we drank scotch and homemade ginger
soda and listened to the Cocteau Twins singles on
a cassette tape made from the box set, which I still
somehow do not have. Perfect celestial soundtrack!
In case you missed it, here’s a great set of images:
Perseid Meteor Shower

★ This flickr collection is just the best: Le Cirque
Advertisements for circus and theatrical acts, primarily French, circa 1885-1925.

★ Oh, and one of my favorite recent reads from this past winter,
The Crimson Petal And The White (which is about Victorian
prostitutes, hooray) is going to be made into a BBC production,
and Gillian Anderson is cast as the evil madam Mrs Castaway!
Richard E Grant (a favorite of mine ever since Withnail + I)
will play “the invasive physician” Doctor Curlew, and Romola
Garai, who I know nothing about, will play Sugar. I hope it’s good!

I had tried, on multiple occasions, to watch 3 Women – knowing instinctively
that I would love it, though I’m not by any means a huge fan of Robert Altman.
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:

From the Ephemerata site:
This Museum exhibition is an earthquake that rends the ground to expose the UNDERGROUND.
A hole opens up, and we are walking down into the damp dark unknown. Descend into our show-cave
through normally hidden strata! Beneath our city is a crowded metropolis of graves, pipes, cables, tunnels,
sewers, and landfills, and as we travel down past the aquifer, a glowing lake of magma! The mysterious
corridors of our subterranean journey branch off into political undergrounds, the subconscious, and the
Underworld — lair of monsters, land of the dead. By spelunking through these passages, we come to learn
that humans are strange creatures like earthworms, ceaselessly dedicated to the circulation of vast undergrounds!
The earthquake of industrialized humans has reversed the strata of land and sky such that what was underground
has become our atmosphere. Please watch your head for low-hanging rocks.

The Museum is open Thursdays (4-7pm) and Saturdays (1-4pm).
We are also open for appointments — call 320-0566
or email mnae@mnae.org for availability.
$4 suggested donation

Beware the wasps at the entrance! Behold their marvelous architecture!

A panoply of stone gnomes are there to greet you when you arrive. I think they might bite.

A new addition to the Ephemerata family has been created this year: baby Kai, who is a player piano virtuoso!
We loaned them the piano a while back for their Wondrous Instruments show, and they’ve very kindly kept it
for us. I fear we’re going to have to figure out what to do with it soon! In keeping with the them for the show,
it plays “There’s a Goldmine in the Sky” – “Take your old time mule / I know you’re growing lame /
You’ll pasture in the stars / When we make that claim” Sad songs for desperate miners!

Enter the crystal cavern – but watch out for the troglodytes!

Some excellent mineral specimens – including the “dubious minerals” – Pyrite, Citrine, and Chrysocolla.

Some Civil War relics, old bones and blood-stained dice. Flotsam buried in ancient battlefields.

We also lent a Tailless whip scorpions from our collection, though I have no photo of the actual article,
the beautifully done guidebook illustrates the beastie. I’m not disturbed by spiders at all, but these guys
are actually quite horrifying to behold! They are extremely intelligent, and have developed brain stems.

The plastic descendent of stereoscopic viewers – a 3-D viewmaster depicting Carlsbad Caverns

In the Impermanent Collection you can view this death-defying feat rendered in ceramic!

Ephemerata Gardens out back are lush and overgrown with sunflowers and fig-trees. A bunny lives there.

As well as some very impressive spiders! Arachnophobes, I apologize for the spider-surplus:
they just seem to keep popping up everywhere I look, and I’ve always seen them as very good omens.

I want to go here very badly! I love caves and their beautiful stone formations so much.
We are lucky to have some really excellent ones here in Texas. Imagine how many are
undiscovered, or on private property? It’s our fantasy to have a subterranean nightclub
one day. We have dreams of excavating under our house and digging down. Oddly enough,
a guy in our neighborhood did just that – this 70 year old man dug 30 feet down below
his house, by hand! Just brought out buckets of dirt, one by one until he had created
three underground levels! Pretty impressive. Now the City is filling it all up with concrete.

“The magnificent underground cave system traditionally called Reed Flute Cave
and known today as the Palace of Natural Art lies beneath the city of Guilin, China,
and is over 750 feet (240 meters) long. The first recorded visits to the cave took place
over 1,000 years ago during China’s Tang Dynasty. Artificial lighting is used to enhance
the stunning rock formations in the cave, which has been officially open for visitors since
1962. One of the largest parts of the cave system is the Crystal Palace of the Dragon King,
which can hold up to 1,000 people and was used as an air raid shelter during World War II.
The grotto features a solitary stalagmite that resembles a human being –
it’s said that a visiting poet attempted to write about the beauty that
greeted his eyes but took so long to find the right words he turned to stone.”

The full set of photos from our Underground tour are up on Flickr: have a look…

So Miss Tamera Verhext is one of the best parcel-senders in the universe,
but this magic box of goodies procured on her recent trip to Paris really
was just beyond… I got so excited that I forgot to take pictures of the
beautifully wrapped cadeaux – Greedy Gretel, me! Well, they were
wrapped in rosy vintage wallpaper, and in the music for “Sur le pont
d’Avignon“, which I have fond memories of singing in French class.
I about peed my britches when I saw what she had sent me:
a beautiful bottle of L’Artisan Parfumeur Coeur de Vétiver Sacré,
which is my new signature scent, and is not even available here in the
States until September! Double-fancy! It is truly glorious, and I feel like
the luckiest duck ever. Tamera spoils me rotten! Here’s the fragrance
breakdown: sparkling, peppery and vibrant-smoky. Notes include:
bergamot black tea, date, dried fruits, saffron, ginger, pink berries,
vanilla, incense, musks. Exquisite! Also, the Leone pastilles, in my
favorite color! I collect the tins, and I love the mint flavored ones
especially. It’s wonderful that the company has existed since 1857,
and has kept their distinctive art nouveau packaging intact! So good.

Inside the golden box was also my very favorite brand of tea, (Kusmi!) in a violet flavor
that I reckon would be divine iced, little gilt die-cut leaves and a postcard designed by
Miss Amy Earles with a little lady tumbling out of a hollow tree. She’s tacked up on my
wall now, with many of her sisters, all made by Amy. You’ll meet another one below!

Miss Oola was visiting recently, and brought me a stack of wondrous gifts,
including this amazing film Ma-ma, a Soviet-French-Romanian musical film
from 1976 about a family of goats being persecuted by a heavy metal big bad
wolf-man with flowing lavender locks. It’s basically the best movie ever made.

Oola also gifted me some books, which look very absorbing – Ashe of Rings by Mary Butts
and Asylum Piece by Anna Kavan. I’d never heard of either, so I’m excited to delve into
unknown waters at her recommendation. Apparently Miss Butts was a student of Aleister
Crowley’s and “about twelve weeks in mid-1921 at Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Sicily;
she found the practices there shocking, and came away with a drug habit.” Oh dear!
Miss Earles also sent me this lovely lady, which you can see in greater detail here and here:
Cellophane over the ocean beds, seashells & glass eggs…
I need to find some nice vintage frames and put her under glass!

Another surprise: this rather large spider decided to make her web right over the kitchen table!
It was suspended from cut-out star streamers that I’ve left up since my birthday (ha!) and the entire
things was quite a work of art – spanning three feet high and two feet wide! The bottom anchor
thread went through a loop of ribbon on a little gift box. We managed not to disturb her too much
while going about our daily business, but at one point I forgot, and tossed some keys across the
table. The very irate spider had packed up every thread and vanished to another part of the
kitchen within the hour. Photographing her in such low light wasn’t easy, as you can see from
my blurry attempt. I also spritzed her web with some water to make it show up better. How rude!

Yesterday, I woke to find that the postman had left two parcels on my doorstep: one was from
our puppeteer friend Libby’s mama Sue. When all the Mudlarks were roosting in the backyard
and putting on puppetshows, Libby’s folks came down from Kansas to see her performances.
I love meeting my friends parents, and seeing where they came from, and where they got their
features. Sue sent me a lovely letter, and great picture of Libby and I, and a beautiful print of
a Victorian lady having tea with a flock of blackbirds. Sue is also the spokes-model for a brand
of goat-food! If you happen to raise goats, keep an eye out for her on you bag of goat chow!

My dear friend Raven was down in Bolivia recently, having joined the circus there…
Years ago, she had brought me a mummified llama fetus back as a gift. It was one of my
most treasured possessions. I named her Galadriel, and loved her enormously until one day
she was stolen from my altar by a very bad someone. Raven had also given one to our
friend Francesca, who framed it in a domed glass frame with dried roses. She was much
chagrined to discover that her mother had tossed it out one day on a cleaning spree.
When I opened the box, and caught a whiff of something slightly rank, my heart soared!
Once again, I would have my very own little llamita! Alas, the box was empty. The two
tiny llamas Raven sent as replacements for the ones Francesca and I had taken from us
had been confiscated by the authorities! Bastards! They were destroyed, alas. I love how
the customs agents referred to them as “dried meat”. I suppose that’s fairly accurate.

(Photo by Christina Cooke)
In Bolivia, you can buy a mummifed llama fetus of your very own at the Witches’ Market.
They are used for house blessings. You burn them as offerings to Pachamama, or Mother
Earth, according to Inca tradition. It’s also traditional to bury them under the doorstep of your
home, and many construction workers will refuse to work on a building unless there is a
“sullus” buried under the front step. Maybe it’s okay to have them on your altar too.

There’s an interesting piece from Monique Mizrahi
on Inside Out, which I excerpted portions from below:

A visit to the Witches’ Market is a must for any curious explorer.
One finds all sorts of combinations of turtles, little frogs and serpents,
which respectively bring health, money and protection from the evil spirits.
These three elements can be found on the figurines of Pacha Mama,
as she is represented with three heads, a turtle on her front, a frog on
her back and a snake around her legs. These make wonderful blessed
gifts to bring home to family and friends. Not only are there Pacha Mama
figurines of all sizes at the Witches’ Market but there are also a wide selection
of dried llama fetuses, known as “sullus.” I had been forewarned about this
practice by my friend from La Paz yet I was taken aback when I saw so many
of them heaped into a pile, staring up at me. The llamas’ legs are tied together
and the smaller fetuses look strikingly like little birds, due to their undeveloped
jawbones resembling beaks. Before a fetus is sold, it is blessed by a witch and
wrapped with some dyed “lana de llama,” a multi-colored llama wool.
The impression I got was that the blessing was contained in the colored
wool and that it was not to be removed.

“Are you a witch?” I asked.
She and her friend laughed and she replied “No, I’m still training to become a witch.”
“Ah, and how do you get these llama fetuses? Are they killed?”
“No,” she said, “llamas often give birth to two babies at the same time,
often one lives and one dies … we don’t kill the babies.”
The answer left me a bit perplexed and to this day I have not discovered
exactly how the fetuses are acquired. Many of the fetuses sold still have their white hair intact
and you can choose the size you like. At New Year’s, special plates are made as offerings,
which include a dried llama fetus and sweets. They are to be buried to ensure a prosperous,
healthy and happy New Year. I bought one but did not bury it and what followed was a stream
of bad luck. Upon returning to Los Angeles, I lost my job, my upcoming photography exhibit
was indefinitely postponed and I nearly got married to Mr. Wrong. So take heed of what the
witches say and beware of their potent magical powers.
- Monique Mizrahi

✸ Amazing photos of the privately owned Natural History
Cabinet of Alfred Russel Wallace, 19th Century
(via Morbid Anatomy)

✸ Holy cats, check out The Frantic Expressionist Art of Josef Fenneker,
a new post from my dear Mlle. S. Elizabeth (aka. Ghoul Next Door) she’s
been writing some exemplary blog posts for Coilhouse. I can always count
on her to turn me on to new and inspiring art and music! Cheers, sweet lady!
Oh man, and now I absolutely must see The Tragedy of Belladonna! Amazement.

Femme avec des fleurs by Romaine Brooks

✸ Portraits from a Romanian Women’s Prison
(via Marina Galperina at ANIMAL New York)

✸ I’ve been hearing a lot about China Miéville’s new book,
“Kraken”, from the enthusiastic tweets of writer Maria
Dahvana Headley and now I’m really itching to read it.
So far, I’ve only read King Rat and Perdido Street Station,
and enjoyed both immensely. The New York Times Book
Review article, Making Squid the Meat of a Story
makes it sound pretty damn tantalizing:
“‘Kraken’ fairly throbs with the fantastical: a squid-worshiping cult,
oppressed magical animals on picket lines, a very bad man who
is actually a tattoo on someone’s back, and a sorcerer who folds
people up like origami and puts them into tiny boxes for easier transport.”
and
“’The book is intended to be kind of a romp,’ Mr. Miéville said.
‘What happens if two apocalypses are scheduled to happen
at the same time? How cosmologically embarrassing!’”

(Photo by myriorama, on Flickr)

✸ You can download a new School of Seven Bells song
over at RCRDLBL right now, and listen to tracks from their
new album. I like them. They are absurdly pretty sisters, an
an also absurdly pretty boy, and they make floaty music.
This is how they got their name, which makes me like them even more:
“While watching PBS at 3am, Alejandra caught a show about
the School of Seven Bells: a mythical South American pickpocket
academy that may or may not have existed in the ‘80s. The idea of
seven minds working as one appealed to her, as did the phrase’s
cryptic musicality, and a creative spark ignited.”

✸ This article from the literary journal Brick is totally fascinating:
The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock:
The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society
by Sean Michaels (of killer music blog Said the Gramophone)
There’s a few more bits on the secret catacomb theatre here:
In a secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema
and here:
Places: The Parisian Catacombs — Paris, France

✸ Also brings to mind this mysterious place:
Margate Shell Grotto – replete with mystical designs, all in glued shells

(Photo by Working Rex, on Flickr)

✸ The Reclusive Artitst: Joseph Cornell and Fernando Pessoa
from the great art blog Escape Into Life
(via A Journey Around My Skull)

✸ A shocking map of libraries being dismantled across the US – so, so sad.
(via Miss Emma)

✸ I want to live here: In a Crumbling Estate, Creativity and History Meet
(via Odette O.)

(Source unknown, alas – I think it’s a Russian body-artist’s work, perhaps?)
It’s possible I’ve posted this image at some point before, but it’s one of my
favorites. I want this to be my desk. I want to be jade green, cool and mossy.

Reginald the rooster.

A bevy of peacock feathers from Lone Grove.

This is where I do tarot readings. Would you like to make an appointment?

My favorite hour. I require this light. I arrange my day around it.

Little altar.

Genie, the wild child – made for me by Pandora Gastelum.

Fox bag.

This is who watches over the garden.