Night Chrysanthemums, Pat Steir, 1984.
Dear Beloved Recipient,
I send you flowers today. These paper flowers, which you can make, and maybe even give, and also this, which is Snow, Moon, and Flowers, a piano piece composed by Peter Sculthrope, and played by Shoko Kuroe.
Dear All,
Oooh! You are going to love this! I was sent to India Rose Crawford by Make Magazine, and I sure feel lucky!
Dear All,
I have seen some things these first few weeks of the new year; it starts to form an image, a collage, a map? Well, how we use it is maybe not all that important.
Last year was the year of Take it All Away; and yes, there is still plenty to haul off, but it was a start, ending with speaking aloud the ugly shadow side of caring deeply, passionately for objects: beings often come second. It happens slowly, I think. The objects are so patient, so good, so reflective of our wishes, our selves. They would never misbehave, they would never talk too much, or say the wrong thing, they are never too loud, their innocence is pure, their value is limitless, as long as we keep beings from damaging them, questioning them, toppling them. Having them adds to our greatness, increasing our mass.
But back to this very tiny, very small, nearly formless object, that you can keep in your back pocket or say unto the winds, this collage of the present:
A beautiful copy of The Rings of Saturn on the table in the sunlight at a woman's home. A blue filled with grey tree branches that climb the sky. A greening under the old washed, worn stubble. An ice sheet on the birdbath. Pages that describe Sido, and the daughter, Colette. Near perfect shortbread fingers. Ruby Tandoh on Cadbury eggs. Chicken leg confit, because duck is so dear. Waves, both blue and brown. A pelisse, whatever it might be, because I have forgotten it already. Like the phrase for this year: A concourse of events? No; an accordance of occasions? A surcease of importance? A confluence of concerns? I look it up, again and again:
The year of the "acausal connecting principle." Something Carl Jung wrote, and I read somewhere in the recent flurries of pages; maybe the book on Los Angeles architecture? Inciting Joy? Not the book about the Shaker boy and his pig, not Carrie Fisher... well, that connection is gone too, but connections are like that; here today, gone the next. I still want them, if only to deaden the clods as they fall.
It's the all of a piece, you know? The reading, the writing, the voices, the thinking, the seeing, the making, the wondering, the glimpsing, the listening, the stitching, the drawing, the remembering. They all go together, joined for a time by the temporary glue of the acausal connecting principle.
Dear Radio Dodo Fans,
Get up and change the station if you don't want these two great songs: One, two.
PS Another place you can go, while the two songs play.
Dear Today,
Listen to these, today, an eight song set of Nick Lowe:
(I Love the Sound of) Breaking Glass.
Maybe you'll hear these songs being broadcast from this 1 mw Supertower.
Dear Motorheads,
I have your song for the day! I think you are really going to love it; my DJ played it for me, and I had never heard it before, which is always like finding coins in the couch cushions or a $20 in a coat pocket. You will recall the last hidden treasure we had here, the Pointer Sisters doing Steely Dan. Oh, and you know, there is another, gorgeous, take flight with me now, cover of a Steely Dan song: spread your wings!
