These are delicious days at my home, though we count the money even for groceries lately. But it's ok. Beans, seaweed, grains, vegetables in season. It's not so expensive to eat well at home. If I ate the meals I cooked at restaurants, it would cost $50. So every time I cook for myself, I imagine I am paying myself $50. Tonight's $50 is for white beans cooked with sage and bread and bitter greens salad.
Bitter and sour, spicy: you might not associate winter hardy veggies with those flavors, but let me remind you. Many of the more common winter leaves are very mild: when kale is strong it has hints of a seaweed flavor, and collars are definitely in a cabbagey family. I've noticed lately that spinach is almost flavorless compared to my favorites. I am hungry these days for the piquant spicy greens that you have to go out of your way for. Cresses. Mustard greens, chopped fine and raw. Red velvet striped chicories, sometimes shockingly bitter. I have a special friendship with a certain farmer's market stand that lets me fill my bags for half price every Saturday at the end of market, and this is what I scoop up. Young onions. Delicate and slightly swoopy fennel roots with fronds, sweet baby turnips, tender stems of broccoli rabe. Today I made a salad of purple baby kales, maroon chicories, minty ancho cress, curly parsley, dressed in lemon juice, ume plum and olive oil. With dumpstered bread, broiled tofu and a pot of grassy green tea: my friends were happy!
I'd like to get poetic also about the spicy radish, plucking up that mellow wintertime lull of sweet mushy winter vegetables like pumpkins, beets and turnips. Once again, I have to sing the praise of the watermelon radish, it's strong flavor and spider vein design of my favorite color pink. This radish impresses everyone!
You know, we are a couple of months into the cold season, and I'm not even sick of pumpkins yet, or hardy greens, or roasted roots. I have no strawberry fantasies, not yet. But I was delighted to see little white buds as fragile as ice foaming on our plum trees in the backyard. Just in time. I am down to my last pint of plum jam.
Pubescent loquats are appearing too, green and modest. This year I really must learn to like them. Loquats are one of the few fruits known to my region that I'm sour on, I think for their vaguely Asian flavor.
January in Oakland, California, this year was dry, warm, sunny. Day after day cloudless carefree sunshine basted us. It began to feel very wrong. Poppies and plum blossoms burst alive too early. Wintertime is a period of huddling, of expressive weather rolling and blasting. Our region felt like an island, unmolested even by the winds or moisture of the big licking ocean that dwarfs us. Michael made a wish on his birthday for rain.
Michael's birthday was on February 4th and I made him a little vanilla maple-syrup blood orange cake that collapsed. We had lunch at La Torta Loca on Fruitvale Avenue. It was unforgettable because the owner of the restaurant, which is a counter with stools on the sidewalk, had a weapons display behind the register that made a lasting impression. He had pepper spray, a giant hook, chains, 4 different bats, 2 different brass knuckles---and mushroom quesadillas reminiscent of the mastery of masa in Mexico, but more greasy, more expensive, less loving. It was grey and windy and there was small-time mafia action that distracted me until I ate so much that I wasn't hungry enough hours later to make the birthday dinner.
Lately, on very special holidays I like to skip dinner and avoid the cooking, and have something like magic mushrooms and cake for birthday dinner, enjoying the brain buffet on the special day. Our pupils were full and dark as we laid in our bed and watched a milky purple moon wink and undress under filmy clouds.
Michael's birthday wish was for rain and a special storm granted his wish a week and a half later. As we made homemade pizzas with friends and drank absinthe on Valentine's Day, a fierce rainstorm belched arctic all over us----a birthday wish granted in delay. The winds rustled the banana trees out our window, interrupting the stream of Vietnamese karaoke blasting out a neighbor's window.
We are finally getting winter rain storms, days of nonstop rain and whipping winds followed by other days of the sun shining on a newly verdant and beautifully vegetably landscape. The dandelions are born suddenly in the yard to nod appreciatively at the rain and sun cycles. Life feels very perplexing lately, with the economy shriveling and values quaking. California is in a drought too. If you check the news, the drought and its impact over these last three years is radically affecting the Central Valley, which is the fertile belt of this coast and maybe the most blessed growing area in the world.
When the rain comes, we rejoice, we are not complaining of inconvenience or scowling at the crybaby face of the curdled cloudy sky. We are so relieved, we are bailed out. The more I witness the world, I have my doubts about humans' abilities to actually deliver each other from trouble or suffering in a comprehensive way, but how pure is the sensation of the diety of nature granting us another green day, the most divine bailout, clean and irreplaceable RAIN.
The proportions of error in civilization become exponentially magnified with every day, the magnitude is indigestible. I find myself avoiding the numbness and alarm by so wholly enjoying what is so miraculously here and still thriving. The first artichoke of spring. The oversized pomelo. The olive oil, only $20 a gallon, because of the trees' proximity. The homemade chocolate and nettle butter shared by Brooke at the dinner party last night. My potted peppermint still managing next to the rotting garage though its companion, the valerian, has died. TOO BLESSED TO BE STRESSED. Last night, I had a piece of apple pie at my dear friends' dinner party and Michael said, "WHAT NO ICE CREAM?" and I saw the carton passing around the table and I served myself because, "DO I LOVE LIFE?"
You must, for those who are so inexplicably in the horrible vises of civilization's failures, those who are thirsty without clean water. Those who would have to pay a huge portion of their income just for a loaf of bread, because of the cost of wheat, or the instability of their currency. I have so many loaves for free, in dumpsters and food banks.
Shouldn't we fast too?
Maybe our time for that sacrifice will come. But for now, no lemon should rot under the holy stem it grew on. No peaceful land which could give to our communion should ever be squandered. Every bee thanked. Every raindrop praised. Every eater's appetite must match the gratitude toward the farmer.
We aren't experiencing it so much in California, but the snow-bound know: It is the deadest time of the year. Cold, biting and dripping with mortality. I hope if you read this from miserably rainy Portland, or frozen Detroit, you recognize your sacrifice and pay deepest tribute to the infant cheer and brisk winds of early spring. Asparagus is coming, so are difficult artichokes and then, the brilliant strawberry, offering you a back payment of the sweetness you were deprived of for so many months.
ENJOY YOUR FOOD AND HEALTH
ENJOY YOUR RAIN AND SNOW
ENJOY THE FLIRTATION OF THE SUN, BUSY WITH ITS OTHER EARTH WIVES
PLEASE EAT 3 MEALS A DAY OF WHAT GROWS IN THE DIRT
EVEN 4 IF YOU LOVE LIFE SO MUCH
RUN REALLY FAST TO HUG SOMEBODY
COOK THEM DINNER (menu: green lentils cooked in wine, thyme and with pumpkin in the oven with a dutch oven, a tart and bitter green salad, your homemade sauerkraut, bread retrieved from the dumpster, a spread made of tahini and miso and chopped garlic, braised baby turnips, blood oranges, if you are not the cook, you must bring the wine and do the dishes! and if you don't live in a temperate climate, I have no idea how you eat local in the winter! do you pickle, can and freeze everything?)
I LOVE TO EAT IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY
GOOD EVENING
HI
I MISS BLOGGING HERE
MY FOOD BLOG IS TASTEEUCHARIST.BLOGSPOT.COM BUT I ALSO WANTED TO PRINT IT HERE
In every discipline that guides people toward food as medicine, the weather and how it makes us feel is the way we intuit what we should be eating to supplement our experiences.
At first when you're learning how to do that, you look at long lists advised by Chinese medicine or Ayurveda or macrobiotics, but once you see the seasonal relationships, you can wing it and eat how you feel.
When I'm chilly, I want pumpkin, butter, warm spices and ginger and chiles, garlic and onions, long-cooked stews, wilted and sauteed greens, roast vegetables, steaming soups.
Oakland has been wildly rotating between climates lately, which I think is pretty usual though the degree is drought-like and a little mystifying. For most of this month, we have had sparkling sunny nearly hot days, which upset my seasonal rhythym. I found myself craving watermelons and having ice cream cones in a T-shirt on a January Monday while the sun set in peals of pinks.
The rain finally came a few days ago to our relief, and now the kabocha squashes on my countertop are being put to use. Daikon radishes, turnips, beets, leeks, celery root, potatoes and all the hardy greens are perfect and delicious.
I grew up eating Dairy Queen in blasted-heat SUVs in Michigan winters, so I guess I'm used to climate bi-polarness, but these Oakland days are crazy! The sunshine days are blazed-out full solar breast dialation, and then these rainy days are painted with the grimy Portland-like dreary long strokes of rock shades. I'm indoors this afternoon, drinking black tea, sensing the homey hearths of my neighbors who I can feel cuddling into their own nests.
Cuddling and cooking: it's the way to cope with this recession. I'm really already feeling it. I work usually in catering, and people aren't really feeling like partying right now. Suddenly, I have found myself with only two days of work this month, and scrambling for other work in the company of many, many people. That makes you really not only want to cuddle, but it makes realness, affection and love spiritual stabilizers.
As an artist and strident anti-materialist, I have been entirely broke more than a few times over the years, and here I am again, scraping by for the meantime. I know I'm not alone and I've never felt embarrassed about this. Over the years I have anticipated the topsies and the turvies and tried to garden and dumpster dive to ensure my food security. My current landlord does not permit a garden, and I am long-evicted from my old vacant-lot garden, but I am still very very lucky to have an essential community resource. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, four women manage a mostly local, organic produce stand at two elementary schools in my neighborhood.
The women speak Spanish, Mandarin and Vietnamese and peddle unusual greens grown by Mien farmers in the area. They don't have beautiful watermelon dikons, or celery root, or parsnips, or spiky emerald brasing mixes, but they always have seasonal, inexpensive fresh food. This time of year we have pears, grapefruits, lemons, oranges, tangerines, sugar cane, onions, garlic, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, potatoes, winter squashes, organic eggs, raisins, walnuts, almonds and tons of greens.
I can buy almost more food than I can carry for $30. I strap the goods to me and start to walk home, though usually I am interrupted by a small talk with the elderly Filipino man at the corner, who has watery blue eyes and a life story whose first chapter exceeds 20 minutes. In those 20 minutes, I am like a laborer, holding all those groceries and sweating. Then the Chinese crossing guard with the rouged cheeks and large smile escorts me across the street and I hobble home with my bags overfilled with leaves.
When you're broke, fruits and vegetables seem really expensive and quesadillas and grilled cheese sandwiches are more economical, but it's essential to find inexpensive providers of produce. Forget organic if you're broke, unless you have a subsidized hookup like I do. Variety and bounty are more important. There's good quality plants that aren't organic, and some research helps to know which foods are essential to buy organic (like potatoes and peanuts).
Fruits and vegetables' essences teach us how to prevail in tough times; they are tough, they thrive in days of drizzle and dreariness. Beautiful, colorful vegetable meals enhance pride in ourselves and the brilliant hues of the gift of life, and the lushness of earth. When out of work, I have so much time on my hands and when you're low on money, there's a lot you might have to give up, but eating is still essential. Why not spend a lot of time on cooking? Foraging for lemons in the neighborhood and preserving them, making breads, soaking and cooking beans, preparing desserts, making steel-cut oats for breakfast instead of the usual rolled oats, making things extra special to compensate for how demoralizing it might be to let tough times feel like your fault.
These long hours cooking, I fantasize about a branch of the Obama WPA projects on the horizon. People who are not literally rebuilding infrastructure by engineering bridges or rebuilding roads, but reworking infrastructure by pursuing community-based preventative health institutions and working to eliminate the carbon footprint of our food. I think of communities having people like me who are supplemented by the government in order to explore ways that our neighborhoods can be less reliant on fossil fuel, more sustainable. Imagine grants for people committed to growing their own food in cities, committed to buying local as much as possible, and are subsidized by the government in order to afford local products as a way to stimulate local small business.
I fantasize so much about grants for people who live simply, who are not cut out for typical American earning and buying patterns, but whose difference should be enhanced and appreciated because our routines leave such small impacts on the treasury, but are so supportive of community.
I want to be a yoga teacher, a local food cultivator and a cooking teacher, whose role is supported through a public works project that makes sense and is an important element to our changing public health system. For now though, I'm on a list to be a substitute teacher.
I want to tell you more about eating well while broke. Many people who work lots are perpetually struggling because they don't know how to cook. Eating out is so expensive---it is amazing how a meal you could make for $2 in your home and have leftovers for lunch---would cost $12 in a restaurant. Cooking is a skill that just doesn't come naturally to everybody. Hopefully you have a roommate who will do the cooking in exchange for dish duty. I will write a blog entry one day on how and where to start, because when I think of it, it's a big job!
If you are unemployed, get food stamps if you can. Do it proudly especially if you try to spend your money as much as you can on locally-grown and produced products. Make a pantry list and spend as much as you can afford on the basics. For me, I go to Rainbow Co-op in San Francisco and buy 20 pound bags of rice, breakfast grains, dried beans, seaweeds, flours and yeast, nut butters, sweetners, vinegars and oils. Try to pay attention to how much things cost. It's crazy when you notice. Some places in my area sell brown rice for about $1 a pound, some places only carry organic and charge up to $3 a pound! That's a big difference for a simple staple grain, and in some countries, they'll riot over that kind of ripoff.
Just empty your pockets for these simple foods, and avoid the chips and cookies and all that shit because it's a big waste of money. Especially avoid drinks. I like to drink alcohol on occasion, and when I'm kinda broke, it's hard to fit that in, especially because I won't drink the swill anymore. I like the decent stuff. So I stay away from other bottled drinks: no iced teas, no kombuchas, no sodas, none of that. Try to buy all your basics so you won't need to visit the market often and get tempted by all the goodies.
Then, head to the farmers markets a few times a week to get the rest. Go at the end of the markets and make friends with the vendors, who are sometimes nice enough to sell discounted pocked turnips or deformed carrots. Farmers markets might be out of your reach, they can be so expensive, so also check out food banks and dumpsters and ethnic markets for the affordable stuff. Try to have a garden also, if you have a landlord who isn't a sourpuss! Pay attention to what's local, that's what should be the cheapest.
It's such a nice feeling to know how to cook, and to bring people together over the meal you made, which was so carefully prepared, from the source of the food to the consideration of how the food will make the person feel. The other night I had a dinner and a show on Obama's inauguration night. I made posole, which is a Mexican stew made of hominy, chiles and herbs like oregano, which perfumed my house in a witchy way while I stirred and chopped, listening to the inauguration coverage and feeling swells of relief. I felt such psychic parasites hooked on my system during the Bush administration, and for a minute I suspended my cynicism and poured imagination and possibility from my heart into my cooking task.
I made posole, black beans, brown rice, a huge salad of dark spiny greens and striped soft lettuces and maroon endives, with salsas made by my local market and onions and chiles on the side. After the show, we danced until we got hungry again and the kids stood over the pots and fed again. I took a snapshot of the moment in my mind. Life has got to be like this forever. Dancing, music, friendship, celebration, food, fellowship.
There's a contraction in ways of life now; the era of human innovation and manifestations through commodity gestures is so thankfully ending. I hope this transition will be comfortable for me, but it won't for anybody gripping on the old values. I visualize inventions in the new peasant life.
I decided to start a food blog.
Urban Honking is not hosting it, it seems to busy to ask right now. Maybe in the future?
For now, it's at
http://tasteeucharist.blogspot.com/
No pics yet, I need to get a digital camera.
Just plant and planet worship for now.
Today is a very happy day.
First, because I have regained my health after another spell of fever and sickness. I had so many dreams. I dreamed that I slapped a snake's face off, and then of a cat named Apron that waged a sinister war against do-goods.
Now I am better and I can feel nature awakening to the fertility of spring.
After months of work, today I offer the fruits of my own fertility. In a triumph against the creative-reproductive pathogens, I have published my first zine and am in a cycle of releasing my best music yet.
BIRTHDAY is my zine. It is more of a personal anthropology confection than a zine. It is a cake made of the ingredients of home, story and personal mythology, made special tart and sweet with opinions and confessions, and frosted and dressed with shakes of my own pretty collage confetti. It tells the story of my Oakland home, my first climb up a mountain, and my wedding. There are tributes to dancing, Princess Diana, ballerinas on Earth, and a review of an Ornette Coleman performance. It is more sincere than serious. It is $4, including shipping.
BIRTHDAY OF BLESS YOU is my new album on Not Not Fun records. It is my meditation on feminine sacred invention, on sun worship in the moments before earth disintegration, on the proud miracle of creation in a trash-proliferation era. I am really proud of this record. It is equal sincere and serious, and there is also a Merle Haggard cover. I was smiling a lot while I recorded it, even though sad things were sometimes happening. It is $15 including shipping.
If you would like to order BIRTHDAY and BIRTHDAY OF BLESS YOU together, please email me at incaore@gmail.com and I will sell them to you for $18 together, including shipping. Not outside of USA though, we'll have to talk about that. And for $20 total, I'll also send my new 7 inch on Arbor records. It's a split with Axolotl.
More good things happen this year. Grouper and I are self-releasing our split tape on vinyl! Acuarela will release it on CD in Europe soon too. My CDR BALLET CHOP is coming out very soon on Ruralfaune in France. A collaboration between Inca Ore, Tunnels and Heavy Winged will be imprinted by Not Not Fun. And Grouper and I play two dates next weekend at SXSW.
Friday March 14 at Habana Annex
Saturday March 15 408 Josephine St. 1-5:30 (Higher Publicity Party)
I'll see you soon.
I'm moving back to California.
It's been a long time.
I am working on a zine right now, it should be done in about two weeks. My writing has been funneled in that direction for a couple of months.
Liz from Grouper and I just finished a split tape, 20 minutes of unreleased material on each side, one side is me, one is Liz.
Liz designed them and they are hand spray painted.
There's only a couple left, but I wanted to offer them to you.
Please email me at incaore@gmail.com or you can paypal me $9 at evacomehither@hotmail.com. The shipping is included in that price.
I am moving to Portland next week. I am lording over my tchotchkes right now, many are going to Salvation Army, I'm busy, we'll talk soon.
The silhouettes are blurring and it's now evening. The city is illuminated in the distance. No matter the turmoil, there is always a beautiful pudding on the horizon at sunset here, now it is a simmered bruise in the past going into the future.
As the sun set, I was dancing in front of my windows to the Secret Museum of the Air's Bali program. Now I have a thimble of wine from Chile and I put on a dress to be by myself. I have a new home and it's a celebration, there are 9 windows here and my quilt is on the wall. It warmed me from Norway to Michoacan this year. It's tattered and delicate. It makes me remember.
I wrapped in it and walked into a corner store in Brussels, a little more than a year ago. I was arrested in Norway a year ago. I was in jail a whole day. I did not have my blanket and it was so cold and rainy. One jailer offered me a blanket and I indignantly refused, and I shivered and shivered until I asked for another. The mean lady cop said, "This is not a hotel!" and gave me a styrofoam container of canned corn and milk. A pregnant cop squatted in my cell and made me sign something I did not understand, and it gave me hours more of trouble. They said I would go to prison camp and then flown home and banned from Europe. Finally after a flood of tears and fear, a man I never met before negotiated my release, and Karl's too. Strangers drove me to the venue, and Karl was released and there, and we were on stage in minutes.
I have made music recently. It sounds like a whisper from far away, under a shell in the ocean, picked up by the ear of an insect and then through a brass bell speaker and amplified through the cracks of Mount Kinness and pushed into the roots of a special mountaintop flower that calls for the lost bees with the mouth in its bud, that's where Inca Ore is coming from.
I have let the spirit that makes my music exist a little farther from me lately. I am cultivating it always, and it is like a fruit tree, it is heavy from my nuturing and the roots bother my feet and the branches nudge at my inner ears, the fruits threaten to fall off and rot. I begin to harvest them and make music and arrange these letters into words. Sometimes it takes a whole day just to juice the fruit a little, sometimes I have to have my oats and run in the streets and search for treasures and then read and then eat again and then stretch and then dance and then admire the darkening sky with my cultivated sensitivity, and then finally I can create.
I was away for days. I went into a car and drove to the Palm Desert. Along the way I met the gentlest policewoman, and I saw dolphins jump at Carpenteria, and the men and women picking the strawberries, and finally I was there, at Coachella, to serve 60,000 people beer. I worked 15 hour days and slept in a tent in the desert. There were no bathrooms near the employee camping and we pissed near the site next to a bizarre desert lagoon. We were camped in between the VIP sushi staff and the security guards and police. One night at dawn I woke and had to piss, and I made my way to the lagoon, darting coma-drunk security guards lurking in between cars. One had a tattoo on his belly that said FUCK A BITCH. I got so mad about baring my ass at that imprivate morning moment that I threw my period pad on the ground. Then I felt guilty for a day thinking of the Mexican man or woman who would have to pick it up.
I got to use the VIP bathrooms while I worked. Bathrooms were very important at this event, because they were shared by so many drunk people, and the many hours of work and sweat made the need more urgent. Bathrooms were the ultimate sign of status.
I did not deal with the people very much as a bartender, instead I was assigned to count tips. My coworkers served thousands of beers with 30 other people. I was hunched over thousands and thousands of dollar bills and counting, hiding under a refrigerated semi truck until VIP sewage started to back up into the grass there.
The VIP bathrooms were deluxe, air conditioned and with soap and long lines into the night. Everybody was on coke, grating their jaws and flaunting bulimia with wan eyes.
Women turned their backs to me in the bathroom line when I said I was working there, opening their mouths to expose their drying teeth. I focused on the Mexican women in those moments, scurrying around and cleaning the bathrooms while the porn starlets and celebrity companions pouted and posed in the mirror. I had a moment's break when Bjork played and I felt such ecstacy, tears even. The festival was a carnival of castrated, impotent feminity, bullied and flattened into a pellet of dubious sexiness, and Bjork was so real. She shimmied and grunted and danced with no sexual innuendo.
And Bjork is a mother too!
And a communicator of new shapes of humanity, a believer in the imagination's future!
A warm woman life raft who wants to float us away from the insincere schemes of deriviative and nostaligic music!
A painted bird that has ornamental shields in her feathers that eternally deflect the kidney stones of haters!
I don't like all of her music, but I like her so much that I like it, I have to like it. It was a beautiful rescue from that bleak crisis: am I a woman, am I a musician, by these definitions, I am not. In that VIP place, it seemed like Sex and the City was the most relevant feminine moment of our generation. It seemed like music was just a function of the sexiness stratas. I did not feel like a musician or a woman then, I felt like a drone in an alien land, a creature with a head like a broken sunflower who would be one of the few survivors when Bjork flooded the VIP with a tsunami of breast milk and made the women make the impossible suicidal decision between saving their own lives or the integrity of their handbags as the milk rose.
The last day of the festival I saw Konono No. 1, and I ran through the crowd screaming until I was in the front row for Konono and then I just yelled YAY! over and over until my 15 minute break was up and I ran back screaming and laughing and began counting again.
Now Coachella is all over, the fake grass is yellowed and flattened after the impact of 60,000 people. Again I imagine the Mexican people, doing the dirty work as usual, cleaning that abnormal and wicked desert oasis. Picking up 10 billion water bottles and my period pad and scrubbing the flooded awful bathrooms. I remembered seeing the Mexicans in the fields on the drive down to the Palm Desert. Every strawberry we eat is at one time in a Mexican man, woman or child's thumb and forefinger. I remembered the women cleaning the bathrooms, acting as the servants of the world's most unforgiving women, who are eternally starved, cranky and freakishly preoccupied with food. The morning after I arrived home from Coachella, I was thinking about the majesty of Mexico, and the people who leave Mexico to scrub the surfaces and wash the windows of unattainable structures.
Then I heard people, lots of people, they were coming closer. I climbed onto my roof and watched a 2-mile long line of people marching on International Boulevard for May Day, and for amnesty for illegal immigrants. It made me so happy, the sun polished the entire hour, and I talked to my mother and father and my lover brought me strawberries and I laid on the floor and pondered the same old things: the perverse beauty of the climax of everything, the sour waiting breath of the dragons of tradgedy, the daily death and recuscitation of all things meaningful, my proud poverty, the inner fruit tree of my artistry growing, it needs a pruning, it's nudging my fingers to unlock and deliver the words.
I am very grateful for what I have.
I am so happy for the library!
I have a purring copper heater in my room that is trusty!
My houseplants are green and healthy!
Meghan calls, and we talk and it makes me very happy!
Michael's laughs a lot and goes under the bridge and plays drums!
I dance all alone and am much less serious than when I was 8 years old!
Maybe we will babysit Gregory!
I will never be invited to play Coachella!
The Norweigans let me out of jail!
BLESS ME!
Ginger tea, the BART train, pine incense, books and music, good friends, my pots and pans, my bathroom and bathtub, my yellow teeth and cavities!
Bless me!
I remember the piano room at Huffin House, I remember the chamber reaching to the ceiling, Josue's sound lives there while his body shudders far away. I remember that dark room, closing the door and stumbling to the piano. The piano shivered alive when your hands contacted it for your blind eyes. I abused that piano, I drove my fists into its keyboard, I made the piano thunder and shake that blind box of a room. Then the piano would nakedly be quiet and I went for goosebumps, to pluck a nerve or stroke a tendon became sound enough.
The piano was banished to the confessional cell about a year ago, but it used to sit outside our first room. Michael would love it in the morning while burning a skillet and drinking a smoothie. Now the piano has no home, the confessional room is now a sturdy practice room, and the piano sits askew and staring, like a kitty trying to get into a kitchen.
I went Christmas shopping at a street fair outside of Amoeba on Telegraph and I picked up a wooden whistle and blew. Saw dust covered my lips. The merchant girls selling the incense and drums laughed and told me just to take the whistle. The little whistle was a present to Michael, and as we listen to the recordings from the last couple of months, it is my favorite surprise in all of the sounds.
The last couple of months. I sit in my room and think about it. In Spain, in November, on a huge stage with the biggest speakers my voice ever touched, I ran around the stage with the quilt as my cape and yelled into those huge sound bodies, "Me gusta el cucuy! No tengo miedo! "
I think of Arizona, face to face with Grandma's watery eyes, she calls Michael "Mickey" and sometimes she will remember the time she won a Mustang convertible at a county fair and collected her prize in her nightgown, and sometimes she will say, "I don't understand what you are saying," and ask if I have met her husband. She doesn't want to take down her Christmas tree.
Then I will think of the Mexican ladies in the mountains feeding their babies in the company of their mothers and sitting around a cooking fire, they watch me in my cutoffs and red sunglasses and laugh with no cruelty. "Infertile people!" they think.
I went around the world and collected many ingredients, laughs and open-mouthed disbelief, and I panted in my nightmares and ate cakes in my dreams. I loved more, and hated, I sat in a tree and did not let the bees bother me and stared at the horses before me, and ran with the grandmas to avoid the bulls in the street. I collected the wings of butterflies and the water of Lourdes, I visited the villages of only men and their billiards, prostitutes and beef. They asked if I was a missionary, if we were brother and sister, if I was a wife, if I was a mother. What a life. I sit in my room and think about it. Did it happen, would I remember the distance I went if Michael was not also a witness?
Jail in Norway, cradled on the Oaxacan seashore, all in one year. Singing into the sea and in the tunels under the freeways and wailing in the echo chamber of the devil's rectum. All the glitter and jewels of my mind, I can barely keep it straight, it is an impossible mission but I must take everything out of the cubbies and purses and baskets, and mix it into a mortar of experience, and make that mortar a towering tribute, and then chip it away slowly, in sheets of parchments which I will paste onto paper. I am saved by expression, I am saved, because without it, I would drown in the poetry of every moment, in the absurd conditions of this existence, in the strange bitterness for we have it all at the end of it all and we are infertile orphans!
We all should pray that we, legacies included, biodegrade!
Michael and I playing at ATP in December
Spain
Oaxaca
I am in Oakland, on the second floor. I have two new bedroom windows and one is over a pupuseria parking lot and the other is above a payphone. My room is over a barber shop and the carpet is red like wine stain.
My things were in the car for a couple of months. My Line Six pedal cooked next to a peanut butter jar of Oaxacan chocolate and the amps sat and steamed while we drove our car through jungles and deserts. I drove all of my things over a thousand cement topes and my violin strings lost their tune. I am looking at all of things that came home with me. Pine sap incense and birds of paradise and a clay pot and illumina mi camino candles and a garlic braid from Pochutla and a hand-made cotton dress from Oaxaca.
I wanted to buy a dress in Mexico and Oaxaca had the prettiest dresses. The market in Oaxaca City was a gallery of beautiful things you need, they had numchucks and copper pots and grasshoppers to eat in chocolate and hot-pink horchata and paper mache masks. I went to the dress section and found one dress I loved but it was a kid's dress and the lady would not let me try it on. She said it was not for me. All the dress ladies wanted to put me in drapes, but finally one lady at the Indian market outside of Oaxaca City let me try on a teenage dress. It has butterflies and little flowers embroidered and a sash to tie in the back.
I wanted to have a dress like the little girls in Mexico, many have long hair and cotton dresses and prance and sing. I was eating pizza in Zipolite, at the dream beach, I was pinkish and hot from a very bad sunburn and in day 6 of a sun coma and I saw a group of girls singing and dancing a song and dance they all knew, even though some girls were 11 and some were toddling. One of the older girls would get excited and bump a little girl, who would fall and cry and interrupt the song, which was an insistent song and if I could have understood, I would know the story. I was entranced, it was the best music, and then at that moment, a group of boys butted in front of us and sang the Buena Vista Social Club song with bad and not charming skill and then asked us for money to support the musicians of Mexico. They tried to sell us bootlegs of the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack.
For 10 days, the ocean always stood near me, whispering and breathing into my ear, announcing the huge waves with gasps. I sacrificed papayas to the sea, I sat on the porch of the shacky cabana and split them in half, scraping out all of the black seeds and saving a few for me, and eating the papaya with the juice of a lime and the company of bees. The new moon rose before me in a curl of champagne as I laid on the toasted sand. The sun gave me a licking with its most firey noon tongue and I suffered for two days, shivering and hallucinating in bed. The pain was such a journey that my imagination developed a more vivid idea of mortality.
Those days at the beach were an envelope of sweet dream, so far away that it might be heaven. But then the mosquitos dine on your calf while you sleep. I woke up every night itching with dime sized mosquito bites. I would become so cross with annoyance when I woke up itching that I would curse that place, but then I would wake and eat papaya in the hammock. After a while, I had to meditate and realize that heaven is like nothing I know. Because I did become restless at the beach, and itchy.
I have a lot to say about Mexico. I was lost in Mexico City and that whole story is desperate. I cried in a gas station and got caught in a parade of paper-mache bulls huffing firecrackers and buses; a motocycle cop pried us for $50 because I was so scared looking and he tried to talk to Michael about boxing; it started to rain and I almost slammed into a barrier to avoid a furious bus driver; I tried to drive around an undisclosed 10 foot ditch in the middle of the road as the electricity flickered and died; Michael asked 50 people how to get where we were going and we were still lost in the black lung out outer Mexico City. I was rescued by a cab driver during a police search in an extremely busy intersection, he saw faces reduced into our skulls by nervous uncertainty, and he guided us. We found a nice cheap motel. In Mexico, the nice cheap motels on the outside of the cities are pretty classy and they are for adulterers. A man behind a mirror takes your money, no speaking, and a number flashes. You find that room number and a boy with downcast eyes unlocks your door and closes a curtain so your parked car is invisible. We cooked rice and lentils in those rooms and made messes feasting on papayas, which are the nirvana of everything orange.
We lived in one place for a while, Morelia, and made friends there. We played music with beer bottles and plastic water jugs and our feet and our harmonicas and we played on the radio, and before our phone in our apartment, and in Norma's mom's restaurant while the next day's mole began its first mingling.
A week ago I crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo, and then Texas and New Mexico and Arizona and LA. I have no more of the Michoacan mangoes, I gave the last one to my grandma in Phoenix and it was pink and sappy and perfumed. Now I am in my new home in Oakland, beginning to record again. I will put all of Mexico into a little book and offer it on this page.
I flew in airplanes 11 times in the last month and now I am at rest, my feet are on the ground in Portland. I am so happy, I climbed up a mountain this afternoon in the rare winter sunshine, I gripped the roots and the fir branches and screamed and yelled.
I am 27 years old tomorrow and I must confess that I am relieved that 26 is closing. I learned many lessons this year, and they were the hardest lessons. I am trying to write them down right now, because I do not want to have to learn them again.
I fell in love a year ago, and the love is expanding, and budding, and this love is painting in new colors on my imagination. This love is creating a smaller world for me to live, where friends are the only faces, and there are not so many strangers. Emotions are important, and small talk is obsolete.
In the last year, I gave my music to the world and I discovered that I was not ready to do that. That was a very painful lesson. I did not realize that it took extreme durability. I wanted to be free, and I wanted to be both refined and unrefined. I thought the purity of my intentions were obvious. I don't know why I was so simple, I think the ignorance made it possible for me to discover my most undiscovered and darkest heart. In six months I made an album, then toured the US, then toured Europe and pluckily tried to play some extremely intimidating gigs. I returned from that tour with a polluted mind. My music struggled under the gravity of the experience. My delighted suspension turned into confused rancor. I did not feel understood and I felt sometimes hopelessly impotent at improvising because my morale was so decimated by that experience.
I spent months in a sour meditation, trying to understand. I still do not understand. I examine the diorama of the music world, and I can't decide if I can part the curtain and enter, or if I prefer to be nuzzling a tree on the extreme periphery. I am sensitive to sound and I hear all of the chatter, I hear all of the men chant "USA USA!" at the events that are supposed to be the gatherings of privledged minds.
I spent the first months in the home I made with my man in a very troubled meditation. I was sensitive to the sudden nudity of the world I was becoming embedded in. Sensitivity is the centerpiece of my artistry. I was poisoned by the dismissive Internet lords, who evaporated the magic of my sound and determined it was nothing but the farts of a trollop.
It is very difficult for me to write about this period because it was immature and disruptive and does not represent all of the joy and beauty that I exchange with the people who understand and enjoy my music. I am trying to describe my obstacle, and it was an obstacle of ego and obsession. It prevented me from appearing on this page for months because I could not stand the pressure of scrutiny. For many people in many periods of music, critical rejection is a source of pride, but I found many of these rejections much too stunning.
I am not a trained musician, I have never been a rabid music collector, I have barely been a social person in my life. I began to play music a couple of years ago, and I had really no interest or knowledge about music before I began. When I was a teenager, I loved ballet. I grew up with very little exposure to the world that I engage now. I barely knew that it existed. My musicianship is a miracle to me for that reason. I was a very antisocial person for most of my life. I could barely speak without blushing. I can make a purposeful sound for an audience now. That is my miracle.
I played All Tomorrow's Parties a couple of weeks ago, in a assembly of musicians that was so confused and demoralized by a tour that we did not even really have a name. We played in a huge room lined with slot machines. The Stooges played above us, eliminating our delicate sounds and their seismic bass crushed our attempts at somehow improvising a new music. We, the players, could barley communicate with each other. The audience seemed to hate us. I felt the collision of the music worlds there. Nostalgic music is trampling the new players who are trying to make truly new music, who believe that there is a future for music, that music now does not have to be a hybrid of ecclectic references but represents the minds and hearts of people who are dangling dangerously here, at the very end of what the earth represents. Sometimes this music is a tender failure. That reality was so present in that room, where we tried to summon some kind of live magic. I put a blanket over my head and condemned the British for being the first couriers of whitey, for their responsibility as the craftsmen of this reality, I told them to be forgiven for their empire. They yawned at me. "Save us from wailing women who know they are attractive!" the bloggers retorted.
Michael and I sold merchandise after our show, we closed up the merch area. Michael and I laughed with people, and he sold his homemade CDs for a pound to drunk people. A French woman brought us some gummi bears and congratulated us on our performance. "I do not think music is good or bad," she explained when we told her that most people did not appreciate us. "It just makes me think of the artists and their decisions."
The decisions I make are conscious!
I am moving to Mexico to be away from self-conscious artists. I will be in the company of grandmas and babies. I am leaving in two weeks. I can't wait to tell you what happens. I am going to watercolor paint and the way I will kill the cockroaches is by dancing with rapid feet! The pollution and confusion I felt in this last year will evaporate behind me!
Now is the time of year to talk about my favorite shows and records and stuff and this is my answer: My favorites were the amateurs and the scared and the nonbelievers and the forgotten and hidden and the babies and the grandmas, all making their sounds and beginning to believe, all transforming their brutish cores into lush jungles of magic, all making their farts into fluffy clouds! The pros are so common, the rare and beautiful are the failures!