Posts from — July 2010

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I do miss a good night’s sleep. But darkness has given me many nights of self-discovery, creativeness and thought consultation. We all have a method to our madness right? So, my justification is that it’s a comforting feeling being awake to experience everyone, just for a few hours, at peace all at once. Innocently resting with their natural thought-flow. A few hours free of obligation, expectation and distraction. I think, write, and spark brighter with the stars, so I can’t say I don’t enjoy my patches of insomnia.

Words- Lord Byron, Music- Zooe Deschanel, Photos- fashionising.com, Sam & Ollie, Mike Colon, yayeveryday.

Sweet dreams til sunbeams find you,

-Jess.

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“This morning I was rather glum because I couldn’t find the word ‘Minotaur’ inside any of our dictionaries. This made me sad for the Minotaurs, but mostly because everybody trusts dictionaries and if they are hiding one little word, then they may be hiding lots of other words as well. I thought, that maybe the Minotaurs wished to be kept a secret, but I don’t know if there’s room in the world for anymore secrets.

Because people hide things too. In their pockets. In the knots in their spine and the gaps in their teeth. And sometimes i wish they would take better care because pockets get holes in the bottom and teeth fall out. You should always keep secrets with the monsters under the bed. You can feel them there and nobody else can see them.”

C: The Unicorn Diaries, Ellen von Unwerth

x Johannah E.

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She grew up in a small town
Never put her roots down
Daddy always kept movin’,
so she did too.

Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a Harley-Davidson
Her long blonde hair
flyin’ in the wind

She’s been runnin’ half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Collidin’ with
the very air she breathes,
The air she breathes.

She was an unknown legend in her time…

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I like to read Joan Didion on the subway.  Her essays.  The dry desert heat of California laces each beautifully constructed sentence and it feels as though I am slipping into a private conversation with a friend who sees the whole picture but, like me, is mired in the individual shapes of each puzzle piece.

My newness to New York City is evident in my approach to the subway.  Take yesterday, the G-train from 21st St. in Queens to Bergen in Brooklyn.  Do you see the girl in the black and white checked 1950s style dress?  You must, hair in a high ponytail, thick rimmed glasses, demure sandals and a fringe of dark bangs — she is delighting in the empty two story subway station and the breezeway it has created.  She reads, actually reads! a hard-bound book amid a group of loitering men.  What book?  The latest biography of Leo Castelli, Leo and His Circle.

My painful earnestness when it comes to books is out of step with subway fare fodder.  The pulpy novels, the gossip magazines, the school books and reports for work look appalled as I stand in the subway car swaying dangerously from both the motion of the train and the weight of my book.  Last week I actually sighed aloud en route to the Chelsea art gallery where I am interning, as a result of Jeffrey Eugenides’ description of complex hybrid emotions like “the happiness that attends disaster”, “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy”, “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar”, or “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” in Middlesex.  The strange look and consequent shuffling away by the older lady who smelled of tinned fish prompted me to swear I would seek out the first news stand so a copy of The New Yorker could be purchased.  At the Strand a few days later I even contemplated the latest Dan Brown novel.

The shame felt from that moment is hard to pinpoint.  Perhaps it was being caught in a moment of not-quite-revelation, but rather of remembering something you cannot believe now you ever forgot.  Those moments happen daily for any avid reader.  Though often they are private moments only shared if you force someone to listen to you read aloud a passage that moved you particularly.  Yet here I was caught out on the L-train headed towards Time Square and the act which I was caught out in was enough to force the character beside me to make a little extra room.
There I was: the subway pervert.

Which brings me back to Didion.  If anyone understands the slightly out of step feeling I experience on the subways, it is her.  She never understood why people refused to be as interested in water allotment in the desert as she.  Or, why strange minutiae tripped her up or kept her attention long after or even before anyone else.  Our private conversations (Didion’s and mine) on the G, L or even the 6-train remind me that while older ladies who smell of tinned fish might not get me, Didion with her over-sized sun glasses and off-beat ways will always be there to stop me from buying the latest issue of The New Yorker.

I like to read Didion on the subway.

“Chelsea Girl”

images from Life Magazine, Getty Images and public domain 50s retro ads

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A few months ago my friend & I found a book called Stories Done, Writings on the 1960′s and It’s Discontents, by Mikal Gilmore. We decided to buy & share it, just to have. I’ve accumulated lots of coffee table books that I flip open to for photo reference or a random fun fact. Stories Done is a bunch of essays on the music, literature & youth culture  of the 60′s (generously incorporating credit to it’s predecessors, as well as influence on it’s followers). Although the 60′s is glamorized years after, I like this book because Gilmore doesn’t shy away from the radical truths, the downfalls- the riots, civil rights, the drug use that brought our legends to death, the internal turmoil, the external spread of communism. He blatantly explains the struggle & darkness within the heavy minds of Rock & Roll artists, rebellious writers, young activists, drug addicts etc. I also like him because he’s a witty writer with an opinion, yet not biased.  Rather than repeat redundant facts about Rock & Roll, he has the soul, the understanding of it all, to tell one huge intertwining story.

With books like this (not exactly a novel), I  don’t read them start to finish. My mind jumps a lot, you never know what food for thought you’ll open up to. Here’s one of my fav sections about the Beat generation that I marked from Stories Done:

Allen Ginsberg not only made history- by writing poems that jarred America’s consciousness and by insuring that the 1950′s Beat movement would be remembered as a considerable literary force- but he also lived through and embodied some of the most remarkable cultural mutations of the last half century. As much as Presley, as much as the Beatles, Bob Dylan or the Sex Pistols, Allen Ginsberg helped set loose something wonderful, risky and unyielding in the psyche and dreams of our times. Perhaps only Martin Luther King Jr.’s brave and costly quest had a more genuinely liberating impact upon the realities of modern history, upon the freeing up of people and voices that much of established society wanted kept on the margins. Just as Dylan would later change what popular songs could say and do, Ginsberg changed what poetry might accomplish: how it could speak, what it would articulate, and whom it would speak to and for. Ginsberg’s words- his performances of his words and how he carried their meanings into his life and actions- gave poetry a political and cultural relevance it had not known”…

…John Lennon changed his spelling of the group’s name, Beetles, to Beatles, in part as tribute to the spirit of that inspired artistry.

Without the earlier work of Ginsberg and Kerouac, it is possible that these 1960′s artists might not have hit upon quite the same path of creativity- or at least might not have been able to work in the same atmosphere of permission and invention.

But the most important thing that these men shared was a sense that, in the mid-1940′s, there were great secrets lurking at America’s heart, that there were still rich and daring ways of exploring the nation’s arts and soul- and that there was a great adventure and transcendence to be found by doing so. Indeed, America was about to change dramatically, but the significance of that change wouldn’t be fully understood or reckoned with for another twenty years.

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