I love this interview with singer/songwriter Matthew Ryan on the Spark radio show (hosted by Tift Merritt--) He says something along the lines of "I hated that my life became a marketing pitch-and some people eat that up" for a reason why he almost gave up music. AAHH! I can totally relate to that... To just be neutral with it and accept it is one level I have reached--but to actually enjoy it and do it well is a level I have yet to reach...and when I see people doing it well and relishing it, I feel like I am defective and I need to get over myself so I can promote myself...alas, it's nice to hear someone feel the same way. He also talks about Woody Guthrie and Job and Marx and a lot of other heady things. Cool dude.

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Sent from my iPhone

photo of beautiful stubborn woman by this guy

It's really dark and chilly outside, on the brink of a storm. And some violent, really sad episodes have happened downtown and around Chicago today. No one in my office wants to go outside for fear another shooting might happen again today.

I sometimes feel Chicago has an apocalyptic, hollow, capitalist tinge to its streets and it scares me. For instance, I see a woman who is wearing a cardboard sign advertisement for a going-out-of-business sale at a crappy jewelry store. And she just looks completely vacant. I try to imagine her joyful, at a party, at church, being herself--and it saddens me she has to spend her entire day as a human advertisement.

It's never been my ideal place to live, yet it has become home and it's where my life finds me. My feelings towards it remain complex--it's never been easy for me to love it. The lack of nature and open space can be excruciating. It's been the defining dilemma of the last five years of my life.

I am taking refuge today in the kindness of my coworkers and thinking about the positive trajectory of my album. I still can create music that soothes and stimulates people--that can be my little part. And I believe it will get out there to whoever is meant to hear it.

If you need a space to dream like I do, look at these lovely images.

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I love this idea.
Makes me want to float some little drawings down the river.

Volcano House

Mists in the lantern ferns,
              green wings furled against the cold,
and a mountain wind
              starts its low moan through ohia trees.
The lava land blazes in primrose and thimbleberry,
scented fires of pink and blue
              racing through jungled underbrush.
I'm out feeding chickens,
              slopping a garbage of melon seeds and rind
over the broken stones and woodrot of the forest path.
I'm humming a blues,
              some old song about China Nights
and boarding a junk,
              taking me from my village.
Miles in the distance,
              Kilauea steams and vents
                           through its sulphurous roads,
and a yellow light spills through
              a faultline in the clouds,
glazing the slick beaks of the feeding chickens,
              shining in their eyes
like the phosphorous glow
              from a cave tunneled miles through the earth.
What was my face before I was born?
              the white mask and black teeth
at the bottom of the pond? What is the mind's insensible,
              the gateless gate?
Through overgrowth and the leaning drizzle,
through the pile and dump of tree fern
              and the indigoed snare of lasiandra
shedding its collars of sadness by the broken fence,
I make my way down a narrow path
              to the absolute and the house of my last days,
a dazzle of light scripting in the leaves and on the weeds,
              tremors in the shivering trees.

-Garrett Hongo

Sent from my iPhone

Sent from my iPhone