Magic
I have been wanting, and meaning, to write this post for a few weeks, and in part due to the subject at hand, time has been in short supply. I would be remiss, however, if I did not make the time to put down my thoughts about what Abigail has catalyzed for me. I’m writing this off the cuff; I don’t want to edit my emotions or rework them. This is from the heart.
For those of you who don’t know, Abigail is a rock opera about the Salem witch trials; it is a completely original work, created by Michael Xavier, Daniel Knop and Kurt Brown. This marks their first original rock opera after producing a number of successful rock opera “covers”, i.e. The Rocky Horror Show, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar. Few debuts are masterworks, but in my estimation, this one is. Aside from being an outstanding work of art and music, it has also been the catalyst for several momentous milestones in my life, all of which revolve around my return, in earnest, to the joy of music I thought I’d had to leave behind.
Some of you who will read this know my story; most probably don’t. Very briefly, I have been singing and performing onstage since I was six years old. I was active in competitive choir for my elementary, intermediate and high school years. After high school, I joined a band called The Mimsies, which would eventually make something of a splash in Hollywood and tour North America. I left the band under tragic circumstance in 2003, after ten years of nonstop gigging and recording. At that point, in the words of one of my new songs, “I put down the microphone and called it a day.” (more…)
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.
More Joy of Creative Limitation
As with the last set of Perilous flyers, I love these. Since the client supplies the artwork, culled from vintage pulp fiction covers, I am charged with the tasks of layout and design. Not having to focus on illustrating the main image myself leaves me free to experiment with colors, fonts and layout tricks. The reverse side of the This Charming Band flyer proved to be an insufficient amount of eighties’ art-school inspiration for me, so I carried over that sensibility to the Perilous job.
The older I get, the more I appreciate being made to work within limitations. Though it would take years to gel in me, I was introduced to this appreciation by noted watercolor artist Doug Walton, when I was sixteen. During my junior year of high school in Honolulu, I was blessed with the opportunity to attend one of his watercolor workshops. My mother pulled me out of school for the duration (one of the best things she’s ever done for me, and she’s done a lot of great things), and I spent five, eight-hour days being taught by a master. (more…)
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…)
The Satisfaction of Typefitting
Kellita, San Francisco’s own Queen of Carnaval, recently paid me the kind of compliment you want to bronze and display on a mantle:
“You ROCK at including a lot of info but maintaining clarity, beauty and cohesion.”
Reading that was a “Wow!” moment for me. Maintaining clarity, beauty and cohesion when including a lot of information on a poster is a skill at which I was not quite adept until recently. Typefitting is very much a skill unto itself, and a skill I actively work at improving with every job I earn.
I freely admit, I’m a font nerd. I love letterforms. I really don’t care for much of what the art world considers “Art”; my heart lies with what the museums and cognoscenti tend to dismiss as illustration, advertising art and/or popular art. There are several reasons my tastes run that way, but the most consistent of these is the inclusion of letterforms in those art modes.
He is Always There
Mucha.
For illustrators and poster artists, he set the bar. His architectural drawing style, his unequaled attention to detail, his ability to strike a balance between realism and graphic design, all with magnificent results, merit him the illustrator’s gold standard. Even when we don’t try to emulate his style, he has a way of sneaking in a cameo appearance. This “Caravan of Boom” image is an excellent example. When I conceptualized the visual from the client’s brief, I wasn’t thinking “Mucha” at all; I had an entirely different direction in mind. Clearly, Alphonse is still working and he slides into illustrators’ brains when we are unaware. He’s there in the color palette, he’s there in the curves and circles of the hair, and he’s there in the ornamentation. Now, let it be known I am not comparing my work to his — I have many years to go before I come close — but his voice guides me, even when I don’t hear it. (more…)
Trash and Rock & Roll, The Sequel.
Photo by Jonah Celebrado
You want an illustration to accompany this post, but you’ve got too much to write to wait; too much to purge to make it through the few hours it would take to create an appropriate visual. It doesn’t matter. You’ve held this in so long; you tried so hard to push It away — to find every avenue that might circumnavigate It, but here It is, back in your life as though it never left. (more…)
Coming Up — 120 Minutes at Hubba Hubba Revue: The 90′s!
Blatant Promo: Friday, March 25th at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, I’ll be performing with 120 Minutes, a 90′s cover band I put together specifically for this 90′s “episode” of the Hubba Hubba Revue. This is something I’ve wanted to do for five or six years, and I’m very pleased to have the opportunity. As for the rest of the band, I am both honored and tickled to be sharing the stage with some of the best musicians the Bay Area has to offer: Bones Padilla from Scission on drums, Marcus Ramsey and Erik Frykman from GravyBoat on bass and guitar, respectively. These guys are real pros, and it’s been a treat to work with them. (more…)
The Long, Hard Road Out of the Holidays
You are surrounded by the absolute truth that your life is an organizational nightmare. Nothing is where it should be, and where it should be is something that really ought to be filed elsewhere. A hundred cities, a hundred doctors, a hundred and one false starts. Am I okay today? Will I be alright to take this on tomorrow? What about a week from now? What about a month? (more…)
All Good Things Need Never End
(This attracted my eye while I waited in the customer service line at Wal-Mart. It has nothing to do with anything.)
It’s your last night in Louisiana. Actually, it’s your last morning. It’s one a.m. and you just tossed a load of delicates in the washing machine. As Janis said, get it while you can. The next available laundry will be back at California prices, and “free” beats two dollars a load any day. (more…)
Hika
Perhaps you don’t know how to love anymore. Perhaps you’re just learning to love yourself.
That could have been a Doogie Howser screen shot.
You don’t know where you are right now; everything is in transition, just as it always has been. Nothing is ever secure, but these days, somehow, the lack of security sticks in your craw. It resides with you, and you fear it’s making you cynical.
You seek silence. The sort of quiet you came upon ten miles off Interstate 35, when, in a post-show stupor, you decided you could afford to venture an hour out of your way. Later, when your eyes demanded you crouch under the steering column in the Cabela’s parking lot for a few minutes’ sleep, you’d regret it.
You’re still glad you went. The Chickasaw Cultural Center is a temple in which most people will never genuflect. Nestled in reclaimed farmland at the foot of the Arbuckle Mountains, the center has everything it would need to become a world-class destination. The Chickasaw people have done a tremendous job in reclaiming their cultural identity and providing it a worthy nucleus. Every detail of the center is impressive and elegant; formidable. The materials chosen, from building construction to paper stock, are of exquisite quality and are masterfully assembled. Bronze, iron, copper, glass, native Oklahoma woods and stone combine in a way reminiscent of Japanese design, but clearly separate and unique. The architecture is modern Chickasaw. And it’s gorgeous. (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…)
Taking Boxcutters to Points-of-View.
You’ve always loved airports. Some of your earliest memories find their settings in far-flung ports of call like Dhahran and Narita. In fact, some English tot likely wound up with your favorite toy, back in 1979, after you left it in a ladies’ loo at Heathrow. The toy in question was a cheap rubber bat you dubbed Fleeter. You’ve always been fascinated by things that can fly. (more…)
Shooting Through a Shattered Screen
You like machines. You loathe entropy.
Shell Station Obit.
A man gave you crabs at the gas station.
Pardon.
A man at the gas station rewarded you with a live crab for lending him your scissors, so he could cut open a mesh bag in which to put his crabs. Crabs, as in decapoda. As in, crabs he pulled out of the Bay. Yes. That. (more…)
When One of Your Friends Jumps the Shark
Life creeps along at its Macbeth-endorsed petty pace, turning tomorrows and tomorrows and tomorrows into yesterdays without much fanfare. Day after day, your beat-up boots measure mundane metrics down the road of existence, their toes hitting a milestone every now and then. Most of the time, that milestone is firmly planted in your own path, but once in a while, it’s in someone else’s, and their toes hitting it sound a defining moment for you. (more…)
John Young in the Floating World
- Crewman Optical Alignment Site
You miss the new saints. Those steel-hulled heroes who, not so long ago, were erected to tower over us all, giving us reason to look to the sky and whisper, marveling, “we’ve been there”. You miss the rocket jockeys. Those cocksure, half-mad (though eminently sane), hundred-ton-candle-riding buzz junkies who first inspired you to aspire. (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…)
Tonight, I Did This.
It’s trickling down my arms, now. It’s like the Freemont Street Experience in my limbs. Chase lights a-chasing, loud and unabashed. Trying to ignore it.
Try harder. Keep trying. What haven’t you tried? The great experiments haven’t exactly failed; they’ve only narrowed your expectations.
One. Thing. A. Day. (more…)
Limbo and a Specimen Cup
Yours is a world of hyperbole. A sometimes-eerie amusement park of exaggeration and extremes. Everything is a funhouse mirror, distorting what comes back to you in kaleidoscopic fashion; you’re thin, then you’re fat. You’re Fellini, then you’re Argento. How you long for a place in the middle; a mirror that reflects reality as it is. The closest you come to a middling stasis is limbo.
And limbo can be purgatory can be equal parts heaven and hell. (more…)
Lost Boys (From the Archive)
It’s how I meditate.
Doing donuts in the parking lot of the First Baptist Church on a blue boys’ Schwinn Collegiate, circa 1979. White handlebar streamers splay out beside me when I coast. Ubiquitous Diet Coke in the basket (it’s medicinal) and a pocket full of business cards, just in case.
It’s a cuticle moon out tonight. Just a sliver. A paring from one of Nut’s toenails, glued onto a circle cut from black construction paper. A thousand stars hang somewhere in the balance. They’re made of Mylar and metallic cardboard and tacked up on the ceiling of a high school gym.
Graduation tonight. Friday night lights bathe Barry Field in afterhours daylight. The whole town throngs the green in a mad crush, anxious to congratulate those newly christened into The Adult World. Infants complain, momentarily forgotten in their Greco carriers, for the love of their (much) older siblings. Five hundred digital cameras flash, making strobe light shadows of mortarboards and bouquets.
I make lazy circles in the parking lot, occassionally sipping at the soda, chewing bubblegum with imperative.
A band of boys approaches me. One has a skateboard. Two have black fedoras. The youngest hangs back, a little shy. Too young to be a part of the festivities, and too cool even if they were old enough, they’re doing what kids in small towns do – hanging out, talking about how there’s nothing to do.
Are you an Adult? They ask me.
I laugh.
I sigh.
I smirk.
In name only.
It’s no secret I have a Wendy complex. It’s why I was in a band. I haven’t an iota of maternal instinct but for this – bands of boys of different sizes and shapes, too smart for their own good, too interesting to be from here, full of ideas and energy and made of slugs and snails and rock music and skateboards. Ragamuffins. Misfits. Talking of how there’s nothing to do.
There’s never anything to do.
Sixteen with an amplified dream in a town of mediocre minds . . .
I wrote songs for them. I met them all across this country and Canada when we were on tour. They were smart and sweet and interesting and they brought me cool Diet Cokes after shows and sat with me when I was ill. They adopted me as their Wendy and I was honored to have the post.
There was nothing lascivious about it. I loved them like the little brothers I never had. I felt like one of them, only slightly different. I still feel that way.
You lovable little misfits in your black fedoras – don’t you know why you’re special?
You’re special because you haven’t yet been confronted with the truth that the world does not run on our time. It sure as hell doesn’t run on mine, and that’s why I’m here. I can’t make adulthood fit.
There are certain critical things adults are supposed to be able to do – things I just can’t do. Sometimes I feel like an idiot savant. Most of the time, I feel twelve. A smart, savvy twelve, but twelve nonetheless.
Adults make things so bloody complicated. The irony is that they complicate things by acting like children. Not smart children, not savvy children – just children. I don’t think like that. My rules are simple. They’re Huck Finn rules, Lord of the Flies rules. Goonies rules. In my reality, all the loot in the world is available to a band of clever kids with encyclopedic brains and skateboards.
Maybe I give them too much credit, but I don’t think so. I was one of them.
Yes, I was globally travelled by the time I could walk, and yes, I first swam in the Persian Gulf and sat at the knees of kings and generals. All that happened, and then I moved to Savanna, Oklahoma. And all at once, I was the misfit. I was the smart, artsy, weird kid who just didn’t fit in.
My friends and I made our own videos to songs by U2 and The Cure. We made art. We dressed up like Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux and went to WalMart to scare the normal people. We scrawled Rocky Horror quotes in cheap red lipstick on the windows of each others’ cars. We cruised “The Sonic” and complained about how there was nothing to do.
For two years, I was you – the eccentric oddball kid looking in on everyone else’s John Cougar Mellencamp lives. Despising the football team because they got all the attention and all the money, while we had to scrape together a drama club from the remnants of someone’s old Oxford Abridged Shakespeare.
I was you, Kid. I am you. I’m still looking in, but now it’s at people with 9 to 5 jobs, careers, mortgages, marriages, 401ks – things I don’t understand and don’t feel comfortable contemplating. Instead of doing those things, I’m riding my bike with the streamers on the handlebars to the local hangout to play Ms. PacMan. I’m living in my parents’ house making art. I’m playing guitar along with my AC/DC records. Adulthood sits ill on me. I’ve always been thirty; I’ve always been twelve. And I think I’ll be sixty and still doing donuts in the parking lot of the First Baptist Church, talking music with the under-fifteen crowd. Does that make me strange? Does that make me Michael Jackson? Does that make me sick?
Probably, in the eyes of the Adult World.
Perhaps it’s not about Adult/Child. Perhaps it’s about Us/Them. I’ve never been one of Them, and I’ll never be one of Them. It’s why I’m here. I tried and failed at being one of Them. I tried so hard, it made me sick.
So I’m stuck with Us. What am I to do about that?
A Crash Course in Survival.
Since getting married, I’ve taken a much-needed break from all things having to do with sickness and depression. I have been through so much of both throughout the course of my life, I got to a point where I just wanted to be “normal” for a while. I needed to stop contemplating, pondering and analyzing all the trauma and simply be for a time. The time off has been good for me. However, lately events have persuaded me that it’s time to start thinking and talking about those things again, and I am at a point where I can revist them objectively, without having to mourn my own situation.
Days like this, it’s hard. I’ve been struck out of life for the past five days, but life does not stop merely because I can’t participate in it. The clock does not stop ticking, and there is no “pause” button. Things progress without me. I feel as though I’m always banking fitness and living; on the days I feel well enough to do anything besides lie on the couch, I have to make the most of it. Consequently, on those good days, I have a tendency to overdo it, but I feel I absolutely must do more than is necessary because I don’t know how I’ll feel tomorrow. From one day to the next, I don’t know when I’m going to be struck out of life again. I’m sure many people with chronic illness feel this way.
On a day like today, when I’ve been forced back five steps, when I have to cancel with a client because I can’t drive and it’s all I can do to just take care of myself, it would be very easy to slip into an attitude of defeat. Everything I’ve ever tried to do has been interrupted by my health. My spirit is constantly fighting my body, and often fighting my mind, although not nearly as often as it used to. I have come to believe that every day is a battle, and, up until recently, this grieved me. However, after allowing myself some time to heal, I see that daily battle in a different light now; each day brings me the opportunity to enjoy a new victory. Celebrating that victory is a great weapon in the fight against slipping into defeatism.
Often enough, my daily victories are pyrrhic; there is no glory in maintenance. There is glory in dropping sixty pounds, or in learning to walk again after having been confined to a wheelchair. People celebrate those things; friends congratulate you and send flowers. There’s (to my knowledge) no Hallmark card addressed to you for sweating out a three-mile run seventeen months after dropping the weight. People don’t send flowers for walking a mile a year and four months after you left the wheelchair. There is no evident glory in these things, but they are perhaps the most authentically glorious victories of all, because no one else sees them but you. Some days, even that glory is hard to feel, so I have to settle for satisfaction, and I like my satisfaction dressed up in the trappings of glory.
I’ve often thought I can get through anything if I romanticize it. I’ve been blessed with a theatrical mind, and after struggling with it for years, I’ve disciplined that theatrical imagination enough to let it take center stage when appropriate and keep it in the wings when not. On days like this, when it’s just me and the road, that imagination comes in very handy. As a child, I was fascinated by the Rocky movies; I guess I’ve always been a fighter. The first record I ever owned was a copy of “Eye of the Tiger”. I played that thing until the groove wore out and then begged my Mom to buy it for me on cassette. Later, during my career in music, I had the pleasure of meeting Jim Peterik of Survivor, and telling him how that song was instrumental in developing my love for rock music. Today, I put Eye of the Tiger on repeat. I let my mind wander over the whole Rocky story; I called up the scenes of our hero waking before dawn, drinking his eggy breakfast, and heading out to his gym – the city of Philadelphia – to train. No glory. No crowds. No coach. No fanfare. Just a working-class guy in gray sweats running through the streets, using what he had. I imagined myself in those gray sweats. I imagined myself with taped-up hands and a black eye. I imagined myself in the still of a dim, dirty East Coast morning before the noise of traffic shatters the silence.
The Rocky Balboa character is fictional, of course, but there are millions of Rocky Balboas out there who slug it out, alone, unglorified, every day. Because our society has grown to have an aversion to all things inspirational, I’m sure there are some of you out there who consider the concept of the underdog coming out on top, well, HELLA-cheesy.
I’m not apologizing for being cheesy. You might say I believe in The Cheese.
I believe in the underdog. I believe in the stamina of the human spirit to endure, to perservere and to eventually come out on top. I believe in the power of the individual to make adversity into a stepladder to reach the next challenge. I believe in the power of the mind; I use it all the time. When my body is fighting me, it’s all I have. I’ve got to jump through whatever mental hoops I can construct just to get my body to do what I need and want it to.
That is survival.
Survivorman Les Stroud taught me the first rule of survival in the wilderness is to keep the mind active. That’s true in the wilderness and true in daily life. We all have our adversities to overcome. As children, we’re all gifted with powerful imaginations. There’s no rule against calling that imagination up when you need it as an adult. Hell – I’ve imagined myself to be a prison inmate; three hundred pounds of rippling, masculine muscle tattooed and branded, angry with everyone and everything, with the power and the will to destroy anything I touch. Sometimes, that’s what I need, as a hundred-pound woman with a broken body and a tender and vulnerable heart. People use the power of imagination all the time when it comes to sex; what’s wrong with fantasizing in other aspects of your life if it helps get you through? It keeps the mind active, which prevents it from steering violently into that tree marked “FAILURE”. Survival is, by definition, anti-defeatism.
Sometimes I have to lie to myself; “this is easy”. Some days, that’s not a lie. Some days, it most definitely is. Often, I can feel myself operating in three different and distinct planes of energy; my mind is foggy and doesn’t want to engage in any mental games, my spirit is nearly always a charging bull, and my body is TIRED, NO SIR, NO WAY, NO HOW. Again I say, use what you’ve got. If one system out of three is operational, by gum, use it. Some days, it is only my spirit dragging my mind and body around, and other days, even my spirit sags. But I go back to that first rule of survival: keep the mind active. Don’t dwell on anything you can’t control. Don’t dwell on the past, or what you can’t do and absolutely grant no quarter to negativity. If you can’t be positive, at least be neutral. If you must be negative, give yourself five minutes of the most negative thoughts and feelings you can call up, then stop it. Let them go. In Minute 6, press forward. Pick up and move on.
I’d be remiss in writing this if I didn’t mention my mother and thank her for being there to pick me up, cheer me on and just let me be when I needed all those things. Thanks, Mom. I love you.
