Carnal
Trumpet vines overhang aging stucco doorways, creating some cool respite for the bees seeking sweetness in the stamina of the afternoon. Ruby-throated birds, like mosquitoes, sip a Coca-Cola that has spilled and lies evaporating in a sticky pool on the street. Somewhere, children are yelling after a football.
In the shadows, intentions are made. Intentions wrapped in paper and string. Colognes are opened after baths and caramel skin is anointed in Tres Fleurs and Saint Teresa water. An effusion of Bay Rhum and roses floats out a window on an upper floor, and down to the passers-by, acknowledgment that even in this soporific heat, someone stirs.
Cigars, dry, their outer wrappings peeling, are lit and left to smolder as long as they will. Cones of brown sugar are placed on floors, surrounded by feathers and photos. Veves are drawn in chalk and housepaint. Shirts are swapped for beads. Flames flicker in a hundred glass cylinders, making tiny church windows from images of saints and orisha.
In the heat of the afternoon, someone will be uncrossed.
The Spring Smells of Emeraude
I love these.They were quick and dirty, but for featuring lo-res, vintage pulp art nicked from the ether, I think they shine. I credit their effectiveness to the color palette, as much as to the original images.
Inspiration comes from far and wide, and the inspiration for the colors used here came from an anecdote the client, Jim “Poogie” Sweeney, shared, about recently standing in line behind someone wearing cloying “old lady perfume”. In my gray matter, the words “old lady perfume” immediately dial up one word — Emeraude.
Someone, somewhere, far back in the annals of my existence, gave me a fragrance sampler for an adolescent birthday. I was thrilled, until I began removing the bottle tops and discovered all four perfumes to be nothing more than four unwearable, escalating levels of “cloying”; the type of cloying that appears to have been favored by perfumiers and women everywhere until about 1960. Either our olfactory receptors have mutated, or tastes really do evolve that much. I can’t imagine a woman wearing any of those fragrances now, without someone nearby calling the CDC. One drop would shut down a yoga class faster than you can say “fragrance-free studio”. While I can’t recall the names of the other three levels of cloying contained (barely) in those bottles, I know the fourth-and-utmost of them was Emeraude.
The word cloying, Virginia, was coined for Emeraude. (more…)
On Tour Forever
Yea, we’re runnin’ a little bit hot tonight/You can barely see the road from the heat comin’ off of it/You reach down/Between my legs/Ease the seat back…
Nikki played Panama for you. Sure, he didn’t know you were listening, but it was still for you. Finally making the north side of Dallas after nightfall, you found a radio station crackling with a familiar voice. You took it as a good omen; another blessing from the Rock Gods that you were, indeed, on the right path. You didn’t know he had a radio show. You never listen to the radio. Yet, driving up to meet your band for the first time in nearly a decade – the band with whom you wrote The Ballad of Nikki Sixx - you have a chance encounter with his broadcast gig, Sixx Sense, and he confers upon you the Panama moment. On the road to Oklahoma, in the November darkness, in the encroaching chill, heat on, windows cracked. You reach down between your legs and ease the seat back and you’re blindin’ and flyin’ right behind the rearview mirror. (more…)
Begin at the Beginning: Handguns and Tootsie Pops.
You’re on the veranda – yes, the veranda – overlooking the Rue Principal, otherwise known as Main Street, in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. The street sign spells out the Gallic name, punctuated by a little fleur-de-lys. This marks the first time you’ve ever used a laptop from the vacillating comfort of a porch swing. The sun is up, and has burned off the chill. It casts focused morning shadows on the four aging, white, Doric columns that support the roof of this porch. If there was ever a place to write anything, this is it. Mere scrawling on a beverage napkin, when composed in such inspiring environs as these, might find its way into the literary canon. It is patently Southern; an office to make proud the likes of Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee and certainly Margaret Mitchell. (more…)
Dreaming in Inuktitut
Nunavut, Nunavut, Labrador.
You spin the wheel to pick a dream, and this is where it lands. Ice floes and akutaq. Six months in orbit, where night is continually falling, falling.
It suits your mood.
Up there in the North, where the walrus sleep, and the scientists huddle around a Franklin stove ordered from Sears and Roebuck in 1959. Up there in the North, where there are no rude cars to give you vertigo. And up there in the North, where Inuit grandmothers tuck their Inuit grandchildren into thick caribou-fur qipiik blankets and nuzzle little Inuit noses under the light of the North Star.
Grandmother, tell me about Sedna.
Settle down, and I will tell you. (more…)
