A Recent Journal Entry - welcome to my mind . . .

I don't date my journal entries anymore, but I thoughts I'd share this one with the world . . .

One half of the first cup of coffee.  Two hummingbirds chase each other in flight in pre-coital foreplay bliss.  Richard says I had a dream last night - probably a sex dream as I was moaning and groaning, but I don't remember it.  The landlady has left for Home Depot with her Hispanic workers.  The world is relatively quiet but for the whine of a distant weed whacker.  Sunday morning is no longer sacred.  I'm not talking about pers and altars and First Communion.  I'm talking about the decency to let people sleep in - to some that is a religion in itself. 

Since I've been back from Wyoming, the city seems less abrasive - not completely void of it, just less annoying.  Maybe it's because I've lived here long enough to see through the facade or maybe it's because I came back with something from the North - the desire to spend more time outdoors, to support the locals (farmers' markets), to sit still and look, not to be so ridiculously concerned with appearances.  Whatever it was, it was good for me, I know that. 

The weed whacker encroaches on my territory. In a city, everything must be so well-manicured, from its fauna, to its women, to its vehicles, to its billboards.  I will never really fit in - I know this, but I puppet along for the metropolitan adventure of it.

Sunday Funday

Yesterday, Richard and I confirmed our lack of desire to go play on the street and try to make money.  It was blistering hot - here in California, while the rest of the Northern Hemisphere steadily inches into fall, we are going into the hot season.  It scorches like the wickedness of sin . . . and so, we decided to have a Sunday Funday.  It started with a small lunch at one of our favorite diners.  Here is Richard looking at the menu:

After a nice lunch, we went to the movie theater in Los Feliz where we saw The Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  It wasn't my first choice of a movie as I am just dying to see a romantic comedy or a chick-flick, but I love my man and I let him see "Rise of the Planet of the Apes."  I liked it overall and it has made me look at animals differently - for instance, when the neighbors' visiting pack of dogs all started barking at me, I was certain they were uprising and going to overtake the planet for a short while.  Sometimes I have a hard time watching CG animation, but in this film it wasn't too bad.  I also liked the part where the guy bled from the ears - you can't go wrong with bleeding ears.



On our way back from the movie, we window-shopped. The first place we went was Skylight Books, where I bought nothing, but am thinking about buying a guidebook to Los Angeles.

Even though I have lived here two years, there is STILL so much stuff to do in this city and you never do it unless someone is visiting, so I am going to start treating myself like a visitor and do all of these things.  I think it will also make me feel more at home here and stop missing faraway places like Jerome, Arizona where there is much LESS to do than in L.A., but you do because you are visiting.  Does that make sense?

We also passed the half-off clothing store in Los Feliz that I like even though I never buy anything there.  This shirt was in one of the windows and I thought of several of my girlfriends when I saw it:

I also like the Wonder Woman t-shirt next to it.  Wonder Woman was definitely one of my heroes and I have to thank my mom for buying me that picture book with the tape when I was little and for not stuffing Cinderella and Snow White down my throat, cause those girls were weaklings, but Wonder Woman was strong and thanks to the influence of Wonder Woman in my life I am strong too.

Lastly, I convinced Richard to go to Goodwill with me.  After sitting at a temp job all day on Thursday and Friday and looking at Etsy.com for hours on end I was in the mood to treasure hunt.   In the midst of my treasure hunt, I did get a little nostalgic and felt sorry for all of the CD players that have been abandoned to the shelves of Goodwill:

And the computer monitors . . . 

Richard found a book about Hollywood and I found this kickass 1972 kindergarten music book with AWESOME illustrations by a guy named Jerry Pinkney:

  Does anyone else remember this book?  I had bought a different copy once at the St. Vincenet De Paul in Prescott, Arizona, but I cut it up to use the illustrations for little cards and things.  This time I want to try to learn some of the folk songs for a kid's birthday party I have coming up next month. . . 

So that was my Sunday Funday.  Today it is back on task with work and bookings and playing and rehearsing and etc. etc.  but I have resolved that I am not working on Sundays again EVER, unless it is for a real, paid gig.  Besides, I think it makes Jesus happy when I go out to eat, go to movies and treasure hunt on the Day of Rest. . .

Stuff I've made . . .

In my blog on Friday, I mentioned how in high school, I used to make stuff.  I made it sound like I don't do that anymore, but actually I still do.  The problem with it is that it can become obsessive and then I spend more time making stuff than I do on stuff that I should be working on - like booking gigs, rehearsing, studying, etc. etc.  Sometimes I give this stuff away as gifts, but mostly I just keep it myself and use it or when I move, I just set it out on the curb for someone.  I tried Etsy last summer, but no one bought anything (I didn't try that hard, I admit) so I gave up on that. 

But I want to share some of the stuff I've made with everyone and get comments.  I'm going to make more - it's part of my high school revitalization, so stay tuned.

1. Magnet:

  This is a magnet I made using one of those glass bead-like gems that you put in flower arrangements.  I had bought a bag of them to make decoupage magnets with, but they didn't really work with printed images because the glass had chips and stuff on it.  So I covered it with fabric instead and glued a magnet on.  I really liked the fabric - that's the foremost reason - and couldn't bare to throw away the scraps I had, so I thought this was putting it to a good use.

2. Horse cards

These are a series of four greeting cards that are made with craft paper I found at Michael's several months ago.  I told myself I wouldn't buy anymore craft crap, but there were like 120 AWESOME papers on sale for $5 a piece and I couldn't resist because they were so hip and modern.  I traced these horse magnets I found (I can't draw this well, honestly) and came up with the template.  They are happy and fun and not so "western-y" like other horse stuff you see.  I still like "Western-y" stuff, just wanted to put my own Devaney spin on it.

These are just two examples of stuff I make to keep myself busy.  Someone once asked me after I sent him a card with a picture of Ralph S. Mouse crashing his motorcycle complete with silver thread (going for a bike theme) where I get the time to do this.  I should tell you that I don't have a television.  So you will never read a blog in which I go on about "Glee" or "The Bachelor" or "American Idol."  I also find that doing silly little crafty projects has helped me to quit smoking and that it somehow stimulates my mind - I do a lot of thinking while I am doing stuff like this.  Eventually, I get to paper and write these ideas down, but it's still creative and I like making things that can be used. . .

San Diego - Yay

Last night I had a gig at Cosmos Coffeehouse in San Diego.  Richard and David came along . . . we got so excited about the road tip - stopped at the Mobil station and got like $20 in snack and soda even though we are probably way too old to get this nuts about driving for three or four hours in the car.  On the way down we laughed so hard and it had this great hippie adventure-feeling - I told the guys that I really want a van, but for now my Chevy Malibu will have to do . . . plus it gets way better gas mileage.  We also drove past the San Onofre power plant.  We've driven by it countless times, but David pointed out how it looked like two boobs sticking up out of the ground . . . see . . .

And at night - the lights at the top blink - it's something special!!!  This is also in one of the Naked Gun movies in case it looks familiar to you . . .

My show was in an area East of San Diego called La Mesa.  It kind of reminded me of Dyersville, Iowa - very clean and quiet and sort of growing but sort of not - plus it had a Good Neighbor Pharmacy, which you rarely see.  David saw this store called "All Things Bright and British" and because he has never been overseas decided that he wanted to go in there.  We walked by it once and then he went back in.  I guess he felt bad about bothering the shop owner, and also felt bad that there weren't any customers in there (though they did have some pretty wicked William and Kate coffee mugs) and so he bougt this bag of chocolates:

They were Cadbury Milk Chocolate Buttons - I'm not sure why they had a pig on the cover - except that maybe if you eat too many of them you will eventually look like that . . .

 Eventually, we ate dinner.  This is a picture of us at this cool restaurant.  I put my camera on the '70's setting so that it looked cool.  The shots were taken in a quick succession and I thought they looked sort of panoramic.  I made a panorama on Photoshop, but I fogot to save it and now I'm too lazy to go back and re-do it.

This is me looking at Richard.  I was having a Bo-Ho (not the oboe - but that's a different story for a different blog) day so I'm wearing this $6 thrift store dress, a $2 green bandana I bought at Hobby Lobby in Dubuque, Iowa and this wicked native-looking wooden necklace I bought at a store next to the Frog 'N Peach Pub in San Luis Obispo.  It really doesn't match that well, but I didn't really care.

 This is David looking at a pine tree and drinking iced tea.  He wasn't happy that there were pine needles everywhere on the ground.  He flirted with the waitreess and she thought he was very funny - he kept telling her he wasn't old enough to drink when she tried to upsell us on alcohol.  He was going to leave her the chocolate buttons, but thought better of it.  David was upset when Richard failed to get her number for him.  Richard and I ended up eating the Chocolate Buttons on the way home, though Richard ate more than I did . . .

This is Richard looking at David looking at the pine trees.  He is drinking Coke.  That Richard sure loves his Coke.  I like this picture because it has a very cinematagrophic feel to it.  It wasn't taken with an impressive camera at all- but my video camera does have that '70's setting that makes everything brown so I like how the brown of the Coke goes with the black of his shirt and the tan of his skin and the rocks on the fountain int he background.

Now . . . the service was slow at the restaurant and I was running late to the gig - shame on me.  I got there to find out that I was supposed to start an hour earlier!!! BOOO!!!! But when I got home and checked my records, I did have 8:00 on my schedule AND I looked back through e-mails and don't think I ever got notification of what time I actually was SUPPOSED to start because the guy who booked me was on vacation at the same time I was on tour.  8:00 is always the default time I put on a gig if I don't know the time.  I need to change this habit and leave it TBA so I know to check back in with the owner, but then again, this is why I am a struggling independent artist and not traveling on a tour bus - NOTE TO SELF . . .

So I plugged into the coffeeshop's P.A. and had a pretty good 50-minute set considering that my strings were as dead as a doornail and I didn't expect to get paid anything and there were maybe 4 people in the whole place when I started (it filled in).  It was a really small stage and a small venue so it was definitely better for a solo gig and not a band gig.  I ended up selling some CDs and making a little dough.

On the drive home, David and Richard spent a lot of time talking about the Beatles and nuclear energy.  I was getting really tired, and trying to stay awake so I worked on my rapping (note both P's) skills.  Earlier in the day I had been watching some stuff about Wheelchair Sports Camp and I thought, surely I can do that (someday). Turns out I can't - I don't have any flow - and Richard was really annoyed with me - he told me to stop.  I said, "how am I ever going to get better at my flow if you don't let me practice."  He said "I don't care.  Stop it."  So then he and David got in an argument about Weird Al Yankovic (I was sorry I brought it up).  David thinks he is a genius.  Richard said he would've faded into oblivion if it hadn't been for "Eat It."  While they were arguing, I missed the exit to the 101

so we had to take the 5 all the way to Los Feliz Blvd.  I think I may have missed it way eariler than I thought I needed to take it, but all the same it depressed me because I like to think I am a good L.A. driver . . . We got home relatively early owing to the fact that I had the time of my gig all messed up.  It was irritating that someone that doesn't live in our place but is just visiting had taken a parking space in the new safely secured gated driveway, but I was able to snag David's parking spot when he left and we all parted on good terms with a wonderful, great experience to San Diego.  YAY!!!

The Style Rookie and How I Want to Go Back to High School

Today at my temp job I read an article about Nirvana's smash record Nevermind and how soon it will be the 20th anniversary of its release.  The article took me back to 1991 - the start of teenage angst.  I was still in junior high when the album came out - just discovering The Beatles and at the same time studying all of these rich classical composers because I was just starting to get really good at piano.  I don't really remember knowing much about Kurt Cobain until say my last year of high school, which was, sadly, two years after he died.  And the only reason I really ever thought about him was because the summer before my senior year I had been living in Iowa City - a college town - and found a kickass pair of vintage Levi's courdory bell-bottoms and these two grungy girls who were sophomores thought they were cool while my own contemporaries thought I was an idiot and pretty weird. But I digress.  The main article referenced all of the pop culture from that era that stemmed from a post-Reagan hatred by America's youth.  I'm not savvy enough right now to go into details, but it referenced Beavis and Butthead and the MTV cartoon Daria as well as Ghost World (which was a little bit later, I think, though not sure).  One of the items the article mentioned was the Grunge movement itself and how it made "thrifting" stylish; in fact, major designers like Marc Jacobs actually designed Grunge-inspired lines a few years later - I remember owning a Harpers' Bazaar issue that highlighted the fashion show and thinking how cool it was!  In this article, it also mentioned how Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain probably HATED the clothes because they were just replicas of stuff they had found at thrift stores - and mainly bought previous to their success because they couldn't afford anything else.  They referenced a website: www.thestylerookie.com and of course, because I was temping and didn't have anything better to do, I looked it up. 

So here's what I found.  Some freshman or sophomore high school student has this blog.  She writes every few days or weeks or whatever and she has crazy adventures that are highlighted with her choosing outfits that match the theme of the blog.  Then she takes a picture of herself in the clothes - a lot of which are thrifted or gifted.  In the blog, there are great collage photographs and pictures of cultural references - pictures from movies like Heathers and Pretty In Pink.  She is clearly fascinated by an era before her time, but I don't blame her.  It was so much fun going back into the life of a teenage girl - her blog about having a slumber party with her friend and reading aloud from "Are you there God, It's Me, Margaret" and sharing tiaras.  Reading this as an adult, I felt a little silly and guilty at the same time and a little annoyed at how precocious she and . . . of course, jealous.

I suppose I was jealous for two reasons.  One, this girl - whose name I either forgot or isn't mentioned anywhere in the blog - appears to live in Chicago where there are enough people who don't care to be silly and teenage.  I grew up in a town of 1,500 people where everything you do sticks out.  Secondly, her sheer unadulterated and unconcerned creativity made me miss my own from that period.

There was once a time when I spent summers watching soap operas and reading my dad's college textbooks.  I listened to the song "Hey Jude" over and over again because I had a crush on a boy with the same name (five years my senior I might add - I was sophisticated  like that!).  I had AWESOME creative art projects - like making book covers with collages from magazines and collected scraps on them.to put on my FAVORITE books.  I made my own notebooks from scrap-paper and vintage wrapping paper I found or new wrapping paper I bought.  I LOVED cutting off my jeans into shorts and wearing tights underneath with combat boots I was supposed to wear for Civil Air Patrol

I wrote ridiculous letters to boys I liked - mostly from nerd camp because they were the only ones I related to.  Sometimes I sent them, sometimes I didn't.Whole afternoons were sometimes spent just digging around our basement looking for weird stuff of my parents or old pieces from toys that I could use for something I was going to make. When I got old enough to drive, I would spend entire days at my best friend's house watching some curious movie like "The Birds" and rummaging through shit in her basement.  We did the most amusing things - like going to a mountain man rendezvous for our history class and then making a "professional quality" home movie on her dad's camcorder.  Once, after a speech contest, a group of us hijacked the mime makeup, donned black clothes and walked around the mall, Target and a few coffeeshops not speaking and freaking people out.  We didn't care - it was all in good fun.

Those years from 13 to 18 as horrid as they were on one hand, had to be the greatest on the other hand: mostly, because there was nothing to worry about.  My parents would give me $20 (which bought a lot then) every now and then and it was enough to get some gas, some food and something dumb at the mall which I would most likely later regret buying, 

Shortly after I started college, I discovered thrift store shopping and that just made life better.  For example, I had a roommate I really didn't like that much my freshman year.  She was a nice girl - I was just in a dark phase, so to freak her out I made a weird sculpture of old plywood and various-sized doll heads with toothpick cigarettes hanging out of her mouth.  She would go out late and I would go to sleep, but leave the halogen lamp facing on the doll head sculpture - all particles begotten at the thrift store.  I wrote ALL THE TIME - some of it nonsense, some of it good but CREATIVE all the same.

There's such a myriad of things in this whole time frame I could go into, but this isn't really a formalized writing so much as a little drafty thing (an essay in the works?) but this whole experience of reading this girl's blog got me wondering . . . 

What happened to that creativity, I wonder?  I used to just MAKE STUFF without thinking about it; I used to just WRITE stuff without thinking about it. I thought everything I did was great - and the funny thing is, a lot of it was - then I got mad at myself and threw it all away.  I suppose you grow up and you assimilate.  Things don't matter as much and perhaps you start to realize you're never going to be the best or people knock you down a few notches.  - you start to look for a professionalism in your creativity - i.e.  I pay too much attention to what my words mean in my songwriting; I worry that my knitting stitches aren't even.  I also live with someone else, which I think has a lot to do with it.  I don't have my own room and my boyfriend is a bit of a minimalist so all of that weird shit I used to collect - pictures from magazines, old fabric scraps, kids' ribbons I would find near the school bus stop - and used to put up on the walls for inspiration has taken the backseat for a meaningful relationship.  Still, I'm inspired . . .

So I want to start writing on this blog more often - I want to read things and comment on them.  I want to make things and take pictures.  I want to come up with crazy outfits and share them with the world.  I want to be self-important again like I was as a teenager (minus the arguing with my parents and snotty, arrogant attitude) and think my stuff is really COOL.  I can't guarantee this will go on forever, but I'm going to try and see what happens - it might give me a purpose again to be uninhibited and push the edges, like a teenager with less acne. . . .

Poems

Once upon a time I was a creative writing major.  I took courses in nonfiction, ficion and poetry.  So I've been attempting to rescue this skill and have decided to put up some poems.  I'm not saying these are good - no one else has read them, but it does feel good to be writing again . . .

Land of My Heart

Land of my heart, you are not

The place of my birth

You are hills of pines and mountains of broken rocks,

You are red-rim volcanic domes and curious cliffs

I will not dare peer from the edges of

In your sheltered villages, the people plant seeds;

They hold the husky shells between thumb and forefinger

And dig deep, aiming for some relief when the winter winds creep in,

Silently but securely.

There is a magnetic pull to this land – I swear to God

I am the only one who knows it – some live there, they know the land

Some visit – they take snapshots and go home,

But I am torn like some hide off an animal:

Wanting to be reattached to the spirit of things.