| Artist news |
[03 Jul 2007|01:42am] |
Today I tattooed a cherry tree. I also put art on Etsy. Can you tell my money instincts are acting up, with the paying of the rent? I like this creative living, but it's anything but stable.
I am making flower hairclips, to give away for free. You must always give away something for free. It is the least expected thing.
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| The Nautical Girl |
[03 Jul 2006|11:14pm] |
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I love the Valley. Oh!-Xiu Xiu |
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I put some new paintings on etsy. I'm not sure if all of the postal work pays off, but I am really happy to have sold some stuff.
I am doing a tattoo apprenticeship, and getting ready for the departure (again!) or my love, back to the cold place next month. Antarctica. I am being left for a whole continent, but I will stay here and learn to tattoo, which is my lifelong dream.
I know, weird for a romantic unicorn girl. And one who pretends to be proper so well! All the blood and skin and ink. I am so inspired though. What an amazing canvas.
Pretty much the best tattoo artist in the world right now. Looking at this site will RUIN you, and every tattoo you see after will look dull and contrived. BEWARE!!!
The artist known as Shige
Really good:
Cat Power- The Greatest (buy this album. It is WONDERFUL.) (musica)
David Mitchell- The Cloud Atlas (like a Decemberists song come to life!) (a book)
Constantine (a movie with yecch, Keanu, but REALLY cool. I like portrayals of magic where they use random household things as divining tools. For instance, in Constantine: a pot of water and the cat of a dead woman.)
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| monkeys and madness |
[07 Jun 2006|11:58pm] |
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John Vanderslice |
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One Line Recommendations:
Lord Dunsany (writer)- Beautiful and rich tales of Mythopoetic delierium and fantasy from a mad English lord.
Art Forms in Nature (book)- If you are amazing by the natural world and all of it's complex and amaxing and graphically mind-blowing forms.
Crazy by Gnarls Barkley (song)- For having a car wash with your best friends and dogs in a sunny urban neighborhood utopia.
;Cornell University Archive of Fantastic Images (website)- What I'm going to rip off in my art for probably all of eternity.
Sock Monkeys (object)- see the one I made for Amie above.
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[23 May 2006|07:15pm] |
you flash in the fucking pan. you backfire starting up, flat tire on the lonely highway. fireworks that flare up, then die, leaving just twisted grey ash, dissapointment. you always let me down. i dealt with you since i was 16 years old, and you came and took the soul of the boy i loved. i LOVED do you hear?
our whole lives coalesced into one perfect day wrapped warm in the butterfly afternoon of forever and ever.
your blight and damp junkie sweat and soft dick moved in slowly, but with such stealth. changing my child to listless ash, my heart to coal, cold solid, locked away in a carbon chamber.
even now i lock it away. i know it is there by the ticktockthrum, it lives but is not allowed to feel. i could kill it, it has been so abused. it is weak, and easy prey.
you hot bath going cold, you sisyphus with your goddamned boulder, you ripped streetmap to a place that doesn't exist. you scarred me up and broke me, my back and thighs and veins and vessels. i always come back to you.
i have no clue of life without you.
soft furnace of warmth and utter surrender to the universe i love that feeling and i want it even now.
you have always let me down.
i will never let you go.
Happy Birthday Cassidy. age 29 (i think)
photo by Michelle (absinthedreams)
model: me
journal entry July 2004
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[10 May 2006|05:57pm] |
I put my miniature portraits up for sale on Etsy, chose a random name out of a hat for the name of my bizness (Lovelorn, after a poem I wrote when I was a teenager), and hoped for the best. I may be one of the few selling ACTUAL ORIGINAL PAINTINGS for under $100, but that's ok. They are small. Like mementos, nostalgic war-portraits of beloved family members (I like to think). I am most interested in how many times each are looked at. The blue Aviatrix is getting more views than the gold one, for example.
Nomi (above) has been getting the most, and that really makes sense, since she is the most striking. I almost couldn't bear to put her up for sale.
I also put these spiral earrings up. I wear mine absolutely constantly and so I made three more pair and if I sell them I'll be able to buy silver wire so I can make more. Yay!
Yesterday Michelle took pictures of me down in the mossy underground tunnel that goes underneath out apartment building. She's taking a very involved and old-fashioned photo class. I wore the giant crow mask that I made for Halloween a couple years ago, and my black ripped silk peacock coat. She said I look like a Surrealist drawing and I realized that that is pretty much my fashion dream. Thanks Michelle! When/If she posts the pictures on her Deviant Art site, I'll link them.
TTFN,
Kai
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[24 Apr 2006|01:40am] |
Oh! I will update soon. Back from the deep south/west. Glad to be home in my misty city by the sea!
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| Far Away |
[24 Feb 2006|01:33pm] |
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I'm in New Zealand, traveling with my boyfriend. For updates, go Here.
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[29 Jan 2006|04:20pm] |
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The Last of the Blacksmiths |
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Without her alarm she drifts on her soft raft into the grey dreamsleep of afternoon quite content, blankets weighing her down with iron down, porcelain sky when she wakes weeping over spine-buildings and spitty streets.
Did I have a dream somewhere in my past that longed for me to be high in the heavens over an enchanted city, sitting in a third-floor window alcove on a rainy day, listening to country music and painting? It seems awfully familiar. I always have wanted to live in one of those high old apartment lofts with a window that is the face of a giant clock. They like putting these places in movies. Who knows if any exist.
"....while a 10 inch snow came down like stars in small calcium fragments..."* That picure up there is by Hundertwasser, a mystical bearded Austrian visionary artist, who I adore, and who also painted ABSTRACT. I make this distinction, cause I am a realist and a romantic and am too crass and kitch to appreciate most abstract art (that's me being sarcastic there). Hunderwasser was one of those artists like I hope to be, with an art that spread to all the disciplines that he practised. He painted, of course, but was also a sailor, a traveller, and a designer of architecture and landscapes. The apartment buildings and factories he designed in Vienna are one of the city's biggest tourist attractions. Let's hear it for wacky public art bringing prosperity to the cities that allowed it to flourish (and here I am NOT going off on a tangent of how VITAL it is for a community to support art, and defy conformity and banality in the face it presents to the world. All people are rubes looking for a circus sideshow, and to present an interesting and delightful and sometimes frightening city to the universe is to encourage tourism and local economic growth. Oh wait, I wasn't going off on a tangent...) Here he talks about his ship, and probably quite naturally, gets on to other, bigger subjects:
"I built my ship as a house ought to be; full of life- and full of life means full of color. Grey is the color of death - and of our civilization, a civilization bearing the marks of death, a dying civilization.
I have no intention of dying with it, and that's why I became a painter."
I went to the Townes Van Zandt tribute show at 12 Galaxies the other night. On the bill (each covering 2 Townes songs and one of their own), were luminaries including my darling Pete Bernhardt, Jolie Holland, The Last of the Blacksmiths (I am listening to their album right now. It is wonderful!), Ben Chasny (6 organs of admittance) and The Court & Spark. The show was great, very informal, but each performer seemed honored to be there. None of them were old enough, or famous-in-the-folk-scene enough to have ever MET Townes (I think....), but it's incredible to see how one lone folkie's influence spreads all the way from Nashville out to this coastal city and it's collection of musicians. It probably helps that Townes is sort of a martyr, due to his early and sad death. It gives me hope though, for all of us that struggle and do our art with all of our heart in our own supposedly isolated little scenes or isolated little bedrooms. We feel like we are preaching to the choir, as our devoted friends are the only ones (again!)that show up for the show or the gallery opening, but in reality we are creating a world that spreads and touches other worlds.
For instance, the seemingly isolated Santa Cruz/ Bay Area music scene, that I grew up in (never a musician, mind you...but as an artist and musican's "wife", and dedicated show atendee) has now spread and produced underground fame and influence for quite a few of the bands I saw in someone's garage at a crazy house-show:
The Devil Makes Three
The Lowdown
IBOPA and Ten in the Swear Jar and Xiu Xiu (all Jamie's bands)
Drunkhorse
Rilo Kiley
The Shins (Mykle saw them at Crunkhouse, not me)
Comets on Fire, 6 Organs of Admitance, Whysp (all bands and projects birthed out of the wierd staff of Santa Cruz Streetlight records in the 90's)
The Velvet Teen
Little Wings
Mule Train (though they don't consider themselves as such, I am sure)
there are no doubt others that I am forgetting.
So....keep on doing, each of you. Whatever you do. Fame means nothing. Our work is bigger than that.
(so quoth the girl who woke up at 2 in the afternoon today!)
*from my favorite Ann Sexton poem that I memorized in highschool while painting in a broom closet. It's called "Us".
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[28 Jan 2006|02:19am] |
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down to the pawn-tom waits |
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ink and pen and ink. then i scanned it, and added the words! tre cool. My brother the DJ.
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[25 Jan 2006|06:31pm] |
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Tribulations-LCD Soundsystem |
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I knitted myself some new gloves, to keep hands warm during the bike ride home through Golden Gate park. Of sourse, I haven't yet got the gumption to knit fingers.
I also got an illustration job, or CHANCE at a job, the new CD art for my friends The Devil Makes Three. They have left it up to me to come with an idea. The only limitation is that it has to be in black and white, pen and ink would be best. Which is good, cause that's what I like best.
So I gotta do it before I leave for the Deep South (New Zealand). Which gives me three weeks. HAHHAHAHAHHA. (That's hysterical cackling there. I'm crazy) Maybe I'll have a last minute art binge like the one that produced Garrett Pierce's CD design?
Here's hoping NOT. Now I've got to quit this internet binge and go WORK!
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| Feline |
[24 Jan 2006|08:46pm] |
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Fred Eaglesmith-"Drive In Movie" |
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Done for Illustration Friday...the topic was "Cat", charmingly enough. Its made with caran d'ache, ink, water, and white china marker. I've been drawing a lot of roots lately, only in the shape of letters. It's a bit painstaking.
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| I'm going to meet my baby in New Zealand!!! |
[11 Jan 2006|10:08pm] |
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Matador Records Sampler |
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Hey You!
Rent my room in San Francisco for the months of March and April! At only 600$ a month (negotiable you cheap bastard), you will not find a nicer and swankier and more comfortable master bedroom anywhere in the city. Fully furnished with artsy painted furniture (do you need a GIANT comfortable Bed for these months? Say Yes!), empty bookcases and dresser, sound sysytem (CD, Tape, and Record Player), and Illustrator's table (the kind that can tilt)!! Yes it's big. Two people normally share it in comfort and style. The flat is in the lower Haight area of SF, close to buslines 22, 7,6, 71 and the J Church and N Judah Muni lines. It is one block away from both Haight St. and Filmore, and about 4 (downhill) blocks away from Market St.
My housemates are the fantastic and easy-to-love Orion Elenzil and Michelle Medina. They share a room, are Vegitarean (but don't care if you aren't), and love Art, Drinking, Mathematics, Spooky Music and the Healing Arts (Michelle is a masseuse). They are MUCH quieter than I.
Please tell your cool friends and let me know:
kaileahsassafras@gmail.com
or MyspaceMe!
love,
Kai
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| Bewarre: Rhapsody |
[03 Jan 2006|10:25pm] |
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John Vanderslice-Plymouth Rock |
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Hey All,
I have a pretty solid feeling that my computer will bite the dust (again) soon, and so this post may be my last for a while. I came home from a lovely and comparatively mellow New Years in Santa Cruz and find the hard drive (or as I like to say "detached life-support system") is squalling and buzzing in a very uncomputerlike way.
I start this year with unpoetic thoughts of actually MAKING A LIVING in the coming year instead of scraping by on the skin of my teeth, eating one meal a day, all that normal Kai stuff. Of course the green land of New Zealand (where is Old Zealand?) beckons as well, I am going to meet Mykle there when he gets off the ice at the end of February, although in all rationality I should not go, because I have NO money and no chance to save any. What would I do if I stayed home though? Continue working 5 days a week as I do now, and pinching pennies and rationing burritos? I don't know. Opportunity knocks, I throw caution to the winds and answer. And then of course, there is my sweetheart, and a new land to explore/starve in.
On Sunday night I had the freedom of a borrowed car and the empty streets of my hometown after an ass-kicking storm had flooded everything and drove everyone indoors. I drove to the end of Seacliff and parked out on the cliff above the swollen fetid rivermouth, which in the foggy rainy night looked glistening black and beautiful. The Ocean roared and the Boardwalk was a deserted surreal shadowland of stilled ferris wheels and twisting silohuetted coaster tracks. It was so heartbreakingly beautiful to feel the rain on my face, smell that fecund ocean, the velvet wet night, everything. Every new year, new fall, birthday...all of these seeming inconsequential dates become dear to me because of this remarkable thing I have been blessed to call my life. Every milestone is the opportunity to look forward to something new, some new change. So much heartbreak and so many ghosts surround me, especially in that coastal town (that they forgot to bomb), that it feels physically intense, overwhelming,... but part of that intensity is the feeling of all of the loved ones I have, and the ornate magical life I lead and all of that other hippie shit;)
I'm just so goddamn lucky. I feel compelled to try to make resolutions, but they are always the same (eat healthier, get in shape, do more art, find a hidden extra 4 hours in the day just for you....)and I never keep them anyway. I'd like to take stock of my life and write down failures and accomplishments, but I am afraid to, because I feel like I'm keeping score. I like the mystery and worlds inside me to not be reduced to that, and instead to be reduced only to a feeling I had while standing on pounded sandstone cliffs over the ocean late at night, watching the river roar out into the blackness beside an empty amusement park, all alone. Looking up at the sky and thinking that I have lived enough. Looking out at the grey stormy horizon, blowing kisses out at the sea, and thinking I can live a little more too. That would be ok with me. I am looking forward to that.
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| Merry Stuff from me and mine |
[27 Dec 2005|08:59pm] |
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London My TaTa- David Bowie |
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Merry Christmas from my boyfriend in Antarctica (seriously.)
Who took part in a "Santarchy" celebration where they all wore Santa Suits and got drunk and sang and beat stuff up. Whew. My Christmas was a bit more mundane: driving rain, foggy countryside, and wearing of Venitian masks!
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| rumi can be extremely dark |
[10 Dec 2005|12:29pm] |
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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Henry's Dream |
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A Black Sky Hates The Moon
i am that dark nothing.
i hate those in power.
i'm invited in from the road to the house but i invent some excuse.
now i'm angry at the road.
i don't need love.
let someone break me.
i don't want to hear anyone's trouble.
i've had me chance for wealth and position.
i don't want those.
i am iron resisting the most enormous magnet there is.
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| I made it to 26! |
[28 Nov 2005|01:06am] |
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When You Were My Baby- The Magnetic Fields |
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I had a wonderful day on the 26th. I forget the name of this phenomenon of your age matching the date of your birthday, but supposedly it is lucky! Here's hoping!
(Here's Ma and I, approx. 25 years ago. Nice bonnet!)
I spent much time scanning old family photos, and being a nostalgic, and enjoying the Fall light through the trees in the valley where I was raised. Swoon.
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miss_nocturne's journal
