grey day

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".