triumph of failure

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 Emotions are important, and small talk is obsolete.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!