Soul food

The Friday morning cabeza jukebox featured this:

Other tracks of the mind wanted vintage eye candy in the form of Liberty of London prints.

Our hearts, our spirits know what we need.  We know, too, if we listen carefully enough.  It was definitely Neil Young and not a bag of Cheetos, a stack of Liberty prints and not anything else.  Correction:  it could have been a stack of faded vintage floral cotton, washed hundreds of times and somehow reaching back to touch a grandmother's apron, the nearly-flat heart-shaped pillow on her bed, sewn of a cloth so soft its touch brought tears..  The two bedrooms had a different wallpaper pattern on each wall, another on the ceilings.  I wish I'd taken time to count how many separate prints she used in the double wedding ring quilt.  We can't know until it arrives which magic carpet will transport us to our true home on any given day.

In another life there was a husband and recreational/useful, necessary thrift store shopping.  How those French cotton, tailor-made shirts reached Ventura remains on the list of wonders.  As does their price: fifty cents, the same cost as the Liberty of London tie, petite flowers in ecru and yellow with faint leaves in pale olive.  I guarantee no one else in the newsroom then or any other time in his life had one that even came close.  The pleated-yoke fronts of the formal, french-cuffed shirts were transformed with embroidery and paint for days away from the office, pairing with the patched, striped bell-bottoms.  The 70s were a love affair with DMC thread and its many applications.

This week I received a link to, as it turns out, a local astrologer/lecturer whose one video sent me to see if there were others.  Heidi Rose Robbins may be found on Facebook, and suggested YouTube as a better source for her multiple talks.  When I visited her FB page a few days ago, the newest topic was Mars in Scorpio.  In an alarming over-simplification of her description, I understood that we are in the throes of an epic internal struggle between personality and soul and that soul must be the victor.  If we are not that well acquainted with our soul, its needs and its mission, the odds of a good outcome diminish.

She suggested beauty - among other things which I cannot put a name to at the moment - as a vehicle to lift us above the worldly demands of our mind, our considerably less exalted self.  While I could proclaim myself as a daydreamer almost without peer, when the inner DJ is playing "Mr. Soul" and, between songs, talking about the visual, tactile fresh air of old cotton, I listen and obey.  Worldly - earthly - matters work on me like water over stone.  I don't want to end up but a nubbin of my true self, having let the bickering mind congress define my presence, masquerade as my purpose.  What I have to share today is that we must listen, listen deeply.  We need to follow the most odd and "other" urgings that send us off like 1950s teenagers on a scavenger hunt, innocent, no trace of cynicism, breathlessly excited to be racing down sidewalks after dark with new friends in search of a crocheted potholder or an ashtray made in kindergarten.

We really are all weirdos, as the Firesign Theater said, "We're all bozos on this bus."  Ram Dass told us, "We're all just walking each other home."  He also realized, “In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.” Not any more.

Time trio with a soundtrack

Poster by Fred Babb

Ram Dass, BE HERE NOW

Here is the site with the original footage from which the Booker T. video by kiddysoulgirl99 was borrowed, featuring Cab Calloway, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Lena Horne and the Nicholas Brothers.  Which tells me in this exploration of time we are also acknowledging timelessness.

Original art by Pretty Scruffy

I rest my case.

HOMELAND unofficial Fan Club: Sign up here

Mandy Patinkin, Claire Danes and Damien Lewis of Showtime's HOMELAND

Okay, HOMELAND.  We watched the two-part finale of season one last night.  I've been dreaming HOMELAND.  Just now I saw a promo for the second season which begins on Sept. 30, with this as the background music.  Well.


We who do not see the better shows on their original channels arrive at the party a little late.  Still, late is just fine.  It was a week that began with the season finale of BREAKING BAD,  concluded with HOMELAND and housed numerous DR. WHO episodes from season six, one of which contained my favorite scripted quote in a long time.

     "You have a time machine.  I have a gun.  What the hell, let's kill Hitler."

There are moments when I wonder at an involvement with fictional characters that is Pavlovian, salivating and everything.  Then I listen to how much more truth there is in the words they are given to say by people who can write and who do not go all Uriah Heep when the truth is required.  David Simon - creator of THE WIRE, TREME and GENERATION KILL  - was a guest on Craig Ferguson's show Thursday night and mentioned the tiny audience he feels is attracted to his series.  I say not so.  Many of us miss them first-run in our cable-free existence but become zealots as they are made more available.  The fan base for intelligent television is not small, it may just be a bit behind the overnight ratings.  Which reminds me, BBC's THE HOUR will reappear this fall.  See what you can learn from Vogue magazine's September issue?  But it will be spring, I understand,  before Mr. Cumberbatch returns as Sherlock Holmes.  Based on my relationship with time, that could feel like a week from Tuesday.  Meanwhile, we will prowl until we find new-to-us treasures with which to become obsessed.  Can't wait.

Extreme Parenting Video Project

On her Friday, August 31 blog Elizabeth Aquino posted the result of The Extreme Parenting Video Project.   The greatest gift a blog gives its author is the chance to share what is meaningful with whomever has happened by or chosen to be a follower.  I keep myself cheered along this journey by sometimes showing the work of artists whose sensibilities nourish mine.  We are not separate from what we create, yet there are some who model a seamless flow of living that is especially vivid.  Elizabeth is one of them.

"Published on Aug 30, 2012 by Elizabeth Aquino

Families of children and young adults with disabilities were asked what they might have told themselves on the day their child was diagnosed. This is what they said.

"Thanks to Patty Griffin for the beautiful song 'Heavenly Days.'"

Just answer yes or no

Unless we are defended against them, sandbaggings and other weighty misfortunes loiter above the paths we wander and will flatten our gratitude and sunny appreciation, snap.  Just like that.



Yesterday and today, like the silent journey of an earthworm, creepy meaningless stuff that is such a chintzy sliver of reality was burrowing toward me, foretelling gloom and that awful steamrollered flatness that may be depression.

So I looked for reasons, reasons that could make this a response to externals and not a true reading of the interior state.  Some options:

Heat - climbing and growing more humid.  Two days of not running the air conditioner was a reprieve, though possibly brief.

Politics.  Need I say more?

Perhaps too much stillness and separateness, though I become easily overwhelmed and quiet is peaceful.

What feels like a compass gone awry, magnetism or other fluxy tricks obscuring a clear direction.

September.  If there was a pop quiz, I'd have guessed April.  Time.  Sigh.

An almost complete absence of answers to any question, other than "I don't know."  Aren't we meant to be more certain, more fixed and drawn to one pole or another, aren't we just supposed to know if the WD-40 will work on that rusted fixture or the hard water marks will disappear with a product I refuse to research on Google?  Aren't we supposed to know (a) that this all comes out and (b) how that happens?

I am relieved to say that all sources consulted say the answer is no.  Just no.  And no makes whatever this is alright.  No becomes tomorrow's maybe.  No leaves enough air in the room to breathe and even laugh.  No means I can read through Julie Whitmore's blog, stare at her painted bluebirds and hollyhocks, her spring photo of wild sweet peas and pretend I can still walk around safely in shoes without laces and sturdy soles.  That I can still wear those pewter-color ballet flats and picture butterflies landing on my arms, in my hair.  All is not as it appears on television or, help us!, the internet.  There is dangerous subversion in distilled magic, disguised as color pencil shavings and painted faces no larger than M&Ms.  Better still, there is the simplicity of beautiful unknowingness.  No.  Just no.

In the pumpkin patch

For all the people and places in this hemisphere for whom autumn approaches, meet Julie Whitmore Pottery.  The piece shown is called There's A Bluebird in My Pumpkin Patch.  Her work has been described as French Faience style.  Each piece is hand-built and therefore one-of-a-kind 

Additional examples of Julie Whitmore's original art are here.

Don't you just want to go bake a pie or at least put on an apron and striped stockings?  I do and it's nearly 100 degrees here.  Her work is just that persuasive.

Once in a very blue moon

Today (still Thursday in California) would have been my cousin Sheri's 64th birthday.  Her stained glass sun, created from a sketch of mine, is next to me in the dining room window every day as I write.  This afternoon South Pasadena had showers, then a thunderstorm, then pouring rain for more than half an hour.  After four weeks of heat and humidity and not a drop of the oft-mentioned "monsoonal flow" through our neighborhood, it was as fitting a birthday gift as I could imagine.  The LA Times this morning reported that in the past two days, New Orleans had an inch more rain than Los Angeles for its entire so-called rainy season.  Living in a thinly disguised desert, I view rain as a blessing, welcome it, especially when not predicted.

On the 31st, we can all frolic beneath the blue moon, the last until 2015.   Do we make a wish, plan a ceremony, eat cupcakes as an artist friend has announced?  It seems we are being called to watch the sky, even if just for a day.  I tend to watch it rather more often than that.  A rare summer storm may signify nothing, as may the blue moon of song and story.  Regardless, both are happenings outside the ordinary which remind me how fond I am of that which falls beyond the ordinary.