let the wolves howl at the moon

I like fishless sushi, and rugs that remind me of New Mexico. The shelves in my bedroom are packed with precious things. Sugar cubes from tea with my mother, favourite books, carved wooden boxes, pictures in frames of old friends and me when I was small, a Japanese soda bottle, and an abalone shell full of jewelery. I have one night to write a fairy tale. 

how did we make it this far?

Our house is always cold, and my room has become a minefield of undeveloped thoughts. Last night, before I fell into restless sleep I had an idea that human beings were like topographical maps. It was a good thought, but the problem is that I can't remember how they were like topographic maps. I will always be mistaken for being younger than I actually am. 

nothing can stop us now.

patti smith & robert mapplethorpe

Robert and I were always ourselves, 'til the day he died. We were just exactly as we were when we met. And we loved each other. Everybody wants to define each everything. Is it necessary to define love? 

that feeling I think we all get, sometimes.

Not Perfect, by Tim Minchin. Such madness & such beauty.
I love it.

favourite editorials

I like the kind of fashion editorial that takes a chance and mixes the marvelously ethereal with the bizarre. It's better if it looks like a circus. These photographs are strange and fantastic (all of my favourite words!) and they tell stories. I like that. 

hot fun in the summertime.

While creating a mixtape of music for driving, there should always be music with harmonies (the Roches), classic rock (the Rolling Stones), songs that make you wriggle-dance in your seat (M.I.A), songs you used to listen to all the time and identify with emotionally (The Beatles), eighties hair metal (Guns 'N Roses).... It should be feel-good, feel-bad, heartbroken, and ecstatic. So that the drive is literally and figuratively a journey (don't forget Don't Stop Believin'). And it makes the final destination all the more beautiful. 

so above, so below.

Richard Mayhew: Don't do it! We don't matter!

Marquis de Carabas: Actually, I matter quite a lot, but I'm going to have to agree. 

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere

i love how you always use british spelling.

I keep snacking like a bird today, and I'm still hungry. Cheese and crackers. Cold macaroni from the wooden spoon stuck in the pan. Iced coffee. Logically, I guess it's because I didn't eat lunch. Watering the plants on the deck, and my feet and ankles to cool myself down. Finishing Preludes & Nocturnes with new knowledge of nightmares & good dreams. Listening to an old acquaintance's angel-voice and avoiding ancient flirtations. I may have missed you for so long I don't remember how to not. 

and in that moment we were.

I put on Brian Eno and turn it up so loud that you can hear my iPod whispering with the car speakers. The air smells like gunpowder. The smoke from the fireworks is still drifting through the trees. I never quite remember how to get where I'm going, but I always make it home. The right hand turn signal adds a snare beat to the music. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. Smooth turns through the July air, the car cutting a wake on the road before the road that gets me home. I turn on the brights and they spray the trees arching above the road with light. One last smooth turn. I roll up the window to trap the music and the heat in the car, between my ears. And in that moment we were.

a significant lack of epilogues.

Read a book in three hours, alone in bed. From midnight to three in the morning, and I need time to let the story go. I can't fall asleep after reading three hundred pages worth of characters. Like a soul drifting from between dead ribs, or a memory floating silken smooth into a basin, the story needs time to let me go. And I need time to descend to a reality where bears do not talk, and three in the morning is past my bedtime. 

as soft as a mouse.

Brought a softly spinning fan into my room to move the air around. Watching Amelie and listening to The Roches. Rearranging my parts to fit into shoe boxes. I love boxes. If I had enough, I would pack my entire life into boxes and seal the lid and live there happily like the girl who lived in the beautiful castle inside of the museum. An hour and a half into independence day early morning. Yoghurt with honey and books to fall asleep by. If you go down to Hammond, you'll never come back. 

philosophy that you can dance to.

back in the eighties
she wanted to be in a hair band

and then in the nineties
she only wore corduroy pants

and then there was emo,
 but that was just a phase

'cause it's all been downhill
since sunny day real estate's 

first record

she plays pop music of the future

and no one will ever get to her

she's a shaker, but not a mover

she plays pop music of the future

(pop music of the future, say hi to your mom)

all the wicked little children

I always loved the idea of the girl with mangled fishnets who dumped the entire contents of her purse onto the pavement at two in the morning, and pawed through it beneath the late-night lamplight to fix her streaking makeup. This summer I like Brigitte Bardot hair, and rough & tumble Americana. 

[Coco De Coeur Wasted Youth]

cotton lycra two way stretch

Spent a lot of time with my mom, poring over the pictures in Vogue Nippon. She says that the editorials are like modern art. More fabric shopping, pulling at the knits to test their stretch. Came away with a print that would have been acceptable in the seventies as a poncho. It's marvelous and I can't wait to sew it into something. 

i'm going to take you to see the dead.

If you listen closely, you can hear the needle punching through the cloth. The waves are stirring the sand around the beaches on Fire Island, waiting for us.

wonderful, by annie lennox.

I normally don't understand dance, but I saw this routine (off So You Think You Can Dance) randomly on television a couple nights ago, and it's magnificent. Absolutely stunning. There's a buttery smoothness to their movements (if you watch nothing else, fast forward to 0:40 when she dives through his arms and he catches and lifts her). It starts out in a regretfully bittersweet tone, and crescendos into sheer, skin-bursting happy. Their faces, as they wind up the routine, are burning with pure glee, and it fades to a stagger-footed finish seeded with perfection. And in the story of the dance, the end is a beginning of something better. Because the story is that he's leaving her, and she has second thoughts about letting him go, and they rediscover how perfect they are together. It's wonderful. I love happy endings.  

i haven't seen a flower child in so long.

lift the shadows from the forest

The trees look distinctly ruffled from the wind earlier. I watch them as we drive, looking for ones that have snapped and I am scared of everything. The highways in Connecticut are beautiful. 

our decadent innocence.

The point is that you enjoy yourself. That you trip through early morning puddles on your way home, and they steady you with warm arms. And everyone tells you they like your shoes. 

avocado salad in the morning.

The windows are still steamed from the downpour earlier, my nails are pie-in-the-sky blue, and there are three ripe avocados sitting in the kitchen downstairs for lunch. Heavy magazines with glossy spreads, who's pages I can't read, and chance encounters in the bookstore to exchange stories about Jedi and camera angles. The sun is peeking back out, and the leaves on the trees above our house are sparkling green. I'm playing four universal chords on the ukulele, over and over again. C, G, F, Am....

it takes a life to learn how to live

I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.

Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

It's against my programming to impersonate a deity.

"... An adventure unlike anything on your planet. STAR WARS. A story of a boy, a girl, and a universe. It's a big, sprawling space saga of rebellion and romance. It's a spectacle, light years ahead of its time. It's an epic of heroes, villains, and aliens from a thousand worlds. A billion years in the making... STAR WARS." 

This is the original 1977 trailer for Episode IV. It doesn't do the film justice but I still love it. The classic Star Wars films are almost better in their original videocassette form. All scratchy and sort of bleached out, the colours of the lightsabers going to white. It changed people's lives when it first came out. From that first shot, when the Star Destroyer filled the screen... what a wonderful thing. 

please try to remember that you are wearing a skirt.

Split-second power outages. New friends in book form. Fresh asparagus from the Farmer's Market and whole wheat pasta that tastes like wood before I cook it. Rain on the skylights. Dad's camping lantern in my fingers, just in case. Work makes my hands smell like used dustjackets. Making believe from my bed. Turning dangerous, dizzying thoughts in my mind. I am tired of waiting. 

the girl from atlantis

A delicate underwater dance in otherworldly frocks. I keep trying to imagine how they cinched the model into these outfits - that stunning Alexander McQueen piece, the Prada dress constructed of missing pieces from a chandelier... and then let her fall back into the water, her toes pointing delicately towards the surface while the photographer took his shots. The fact that she looks like she is dead and has fallen into the water to spin loosely beneath the waves is the best part. It's a disastrous dance that they captured, and it's perfect. 

[vogue nippon]

my brother has malaria.

In the children's hospital, they have Scrabble, and clowns that tell jokes to make the children laugh. There is an arts and crafts table, and he remembered the jokes the clown told to tell me when he comes home. It rained here tonight, and I made instant chocolate pudding for dessert and ate it with my hands from the bowl. I sat on my bed reading feverishly, and left the door open. 

extraordinary in every sense of the word.

The electric buzz of not looking like anyone else. 

dancing & fighting

Kicking midsummer gloom straight in the face. Late nights at the beach. Music shimmying its way out of the rolled-down windows of our car. Sleeves that are too long for our arms. Lighting incense for everyone we ever knew. Lying on the rug and spinning stories. Taking advantage of the weightlessness that comes with plunging straight into the water. 

a man who appreciated details

Listening to the tribute album to Gram Parsons (Return of the Grievous Angel). 

like butter scraped over too much bread.

My heart hurts from missing people and places I can't have. Pretending that my room is on a submarine and that I can see fishes from the window. Eating beans on toast and skipping breakfast (my own lazy fault). I created a mermaid prototype at work, and recalled childhood. Listening to women singing in big, throaty voices. Trying to organize my spaces.