Moonlit Nothings

custom art-nouveau peacock for Ms. Medina

2008-02-17T22:06:46Z

I'm really happy with the way it turned out. We may have one more session if I can wrestle her back into the chair ;)

Artist news

2007-07-03T08:51:30Z

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.

miss_nocturne @ 2006-11-13T16:29:00

2006-11-13T23:29:25Z

I am in Antarctica right now, working for electrical supply at McMurdo Station and trying to keep my senses working against the din of engines and the grey opression of a windowless warehouse.
Luckily, it's an icy otherworld of beauty and volcanos and frozen ocean expanses around here.
Read all about it here:
Moonlitnothings scrawled into the moss on the bark of a tree, or carved into ice using only her black black fingernails

The Nautical Girl

2006-07-04T06:26:16Z

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.)

monkeys and madness

2006-06-08T06:59:21Z

;

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.

miss_nocturne @ 2006-05-23T19:15:00

2006-05-24T02:30:04Z

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

miss_nocturne @ 2006-05-10T17:57:00

2006-05-11T02:12:03Z

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

miss_nocturne @ 2006-04-24T01:40:00

2006-04-24T08:42:31Z

Oh! I will update soon. Back from the deep south/west. Glad to be home in my misty city by the sea!

Far Away

2006-02-24T00:34:39Z

I'm in New Zealand, traveling with my boyfriend. For updates, go Here.

miss_nocturne @ 2006-01-29T16:20:00

2006-01-30T00:44:10Z

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".

miss_nocturne @ 2006-01-28T02:19:00

2006-01-28T10:28:15Z

ink and pen and ink. then i scanned it, and added the words! tre cool. My brother the DJ.

miss_nocturne @ 2006-01-25T18:31:00

2006-01-26T02:43:52Z

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!

Feline

2006-01-25T04:50:26Z

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.

Photo by Michelle Medina

2006-01-19T02:54:36Z

I'm the broody one on the right. The wig is pretty awesome, I must say.

More of Michelle's photos

I'm going to meet my baby in New Zealand!!!

2006-01-12T06:09:56Z

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

Bewarre: Rhapsody

2006-01-04T06:26:29Z

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.

Merry Stuff from me and mine

2005-12-28T05:08:58Z

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!

illo-girl in her illo world

2005-12-21T08:23:25Z

Look at me doing my commissions! Good artist!
It's a rainy misty night in San Francisco (a common posting-weather/time-of-day for me, I guess), and I have a frog in my throat. Midnight finds me at my table, drinking hot whiskey and lemon with cayanne pepper, illustrating a diagram for Lauren, who lives in the tiny arctic island of Svalbard, and makes fabric baby slings which she sells on the internet. Colibri Baby

My task? To make simple illustrations that show people of all nations how to use their sling without tying baby upside-down or strangling themselves. I feel this burden to communicate SAFETY.

I just finished another commission too - this one for my brother, the DJ.

This time, the instructions are quite different: a drawing that makes people in a sleepy college town in the central valley want to come out on a Sunday night and dance to whatever the hell my brother wants to play.
The listing of bands in the background there says:

Depeche Mode. We Are Scientists. The Faint. Bloc
Party. Death Cab For Cutie. Franz Ferdinand. Chromeo.
Nate Dogg. !!!. Modest Mouse. Kissing Tigers. David
Bowie. Pulp. New Order. Blur. Joy Division. The
Walkmen. The Strokes. Gorillaz. Interpol.
Fischerspooner. The Rapture. Radio 4. The Killers.
Adult. Death From Above 1979. The Von Bondies. LCD
Soundsystem. Metric. The Cure. Cut Copy. Supersystem.
Gwen Stefani. Kelly Clarkson. Amerie. Client.
Elastica. Mount Sims. Spoon. Whitey. Soulwax. The
Bravery. Clor. Gang of Four. Goldfrapp. Of Montreal.
The Stills.

That's my bro. Always with the eclectic taste. Runs in the fandamnly.
That sort of scanned shittily. How about this:

Picture of my ex-huz.

rumi can be extremely dark

2005-12-10T20:30:14Z

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.

I made it to 26!

2005-11-28T09:13:20Z

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.

conked out

2005-11-08T10:35:20Z

In my house we like to sleep.

it's a rainy night and the constant dripping of the rain from the eaves sounds like little children marching arhythmically down cobblestone lanes. Pattering. Tapping. Tap-dancing of drops.

Tonight of Yesterday

The evening slips you into it, has kept a place for you and those wildwood limbs that have already settled on the morning. The words you have for it are flyblown now as the dandelion you'll whistle tomorrow into lighter air. But tonight, your sleep will be as round as your mouth, berried with the story of the sunlight finally run to ground. You are all about tomorrow. The moon has your name memorized: the curl of your back, your face, an open book.

-Vona Groarke

Peering out

2005-11-04T08:04:43Z

;

I always say that I spend a lot of time "painting black on black". Which means, I spend an inordinate amount of time painstakingly and lovingly painting details that no one will see. This painting is a pefect example. Above is a close-up of the painting, but in the actual whole painting there is another flower silohuette (this time in dark blue-black instead of gold) upside-down to the right of the face. You can only really see it when the painting is tipped a certain way.

I look at it as another "task you have to perform for the Faery King" (like counting grains of sand on a beach or weaving sparrow's shirts out of spider's gossamer): meaningless in the human scheme of things, but dictated as essential for some greater and whimsical and more obscure good. I say this ruefully and humorously, of course. I'm probably just an artistic masochist.

miss_nocturne @ 2005-10-31T17:41:00

2005-11-01T01:54:26Z

Happy Halloween from me and my friend:

My brother is a disc jockey/ Dance Music

2005-10-26T02:01:29Z

I made him this flyer, using the super djanky art program that comes with my scanner, as I hath no photoshop or illustrator (I knw! It's a crime!)
Not that anyone I know is in Davis, but Jordan's a non-snobby music snob DJ so you should go see him! He's knows what people like to dance to, basically. His Dj name is Boy Wonder, which I think goes rather well with the baby blue suit:

Songs I like to dance to:
1.Babe, I'm on fire- Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
This song is 15 minutes long, and I have danced to the whole thing I think 3 times now. Usually in living rooms. It's basically a crazy organ-fuelled list of all the people in the world we happen to be saying, "Babe, I'm on Fire". And you will be too, after you dance to the whole thing.
2. Miss You- The Rolling Stones
The lyrics are hilareous. Once I was at a party and the host had it on PINK vinyl! AND I didn't steal it!
3. When you were mine- Cyndi Lauper version
This song is by Prince, but I like Cyndi's version better because she is so squeaky. All I imagine when I hear this song is This girl jumping up and down in the air because it's her favorite.
4. Get Up- Nate Dogg
This is hip-hop, which besides Goth, is my favorite kind of music to dance to. This song has this incredible build up and Nate Dogg sings like he is in a barbershop quartet.
5. Man Tap- The Devil Makes Three
These are my friends, absolutley kickass punk bluegrass, and they dedicate this to me at their shows. OOOh, I love that. Make friends with a band just so you can have that pleasure! This song has great lines about "changing a creature of the sky to a creature of the land".
6. Tainted Love- Soft Cell
A nostalgic favorite, not because I was dancing at clubs in the 80's (I was a child), but because when I got my fake ID JUST so I could go dancing, I would go to 80's nights at bars, and this song would drive me out of my mind.
7. Hives- IBOPA
An amazing song with accordian by the late great IBOPA. The lead singer, Jamie, is not getting famous with his band Xiu Xiu, but he used to make this crazy music. As far as I can tell, it's a song about being HIV positive, and not afraid to die. I'm seriously going to bput it on my computer and link a copy to download, just so you can understand how it makes me dance around in my bedroom like someone who has been mixing their ouzo and their nitrous oxide.
8. Cold Cold Ground- Tom Waits
This is a slow dance song. The first time I went to the local gothic night with Mykle, they inexplicably played this, and it was one of the best moments of my life, cause it's so sad and so beautiful.
9. Magic Stick- Lil'Kim
I just love how raunchy the lyrics are: "I'm in the crib givin' niggaz deep throat". My Lord. Really good for booze-soaked-dance-nights when the dyke crews roll up.
10. Happy Birthday- Stevie Wonder
In case you didn't know already, I have THE DORKIEST family on the planet earth, and damn are we proud of it. Actually, only the children in my family are actually conscious of this dorkiness, but here is an example of it: We have a custom, when it is anyone's birthday in the family, to put on this song (a very catchy song) and dance together in the living room. There are only four of us. It totally rules.

Feel free to make your own list! It's sort of exciting.

Illustration Friday-cold

2005-10-20T02:29:53Z

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the sides of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don't all require light in the same degree.
Some of us make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.

-Louise Gluck

Your assignment,
{those of you who have still the tolerance and reverance for the outmoded form of communication and prayer called Poetry}:
Find a poem you love, and reproduce it - write it in your own handwriting, or calligraph it, or type it on your computer or typewriter (if you still like poetry, you probably still have a typewriter). Now illustrate it.
I AM CONVINCED THAT THIS IS THE BEST WAY TO ENJOY A PIECE OF WRITING.
(You can also stand on a chair and read it out loud to your housemates)