Well, not a whole lot has happened since I blogged here last night, so I will be brief here. (By the way, that photo of the barn up above is just off the main road here, where the farms begin. All summer long, it is hidden behind tons of leaves. In fall, it begins to re-emerge.)
Mostly, I wanted to post a photo of the last of my impatiens. The ones on the kitchen porch bloomed themselves out several weeks ago, but the ones on my front step are still in their glory. However, over the next several nights, the temperatures will dip into the 20s Fahrenheit, so the impatiens will be gone.
The last days of the impatiens on the front step.
And since I was out there photographing the flowers (in the rain), I thought you might like to see what my sidewalk looks like — a tad bit leaf-strewn! And this is only about 10% of the maple leaves. Most of them are still on the (enormous) tree!
Leaves covering my front sidewalk.
You can see here just how close the front walk is to the windows in my family room. So when people walk by in summer and the windows are wide open, it really does feel like they are inside my house! (This is why previous owners of the house never opened the front door, and why it is now sealed shut with decades of paint. I, however, would like to get that front door opened, also maybe even put in a screen door for summer because I don’t really mind having occasional people, and various dogs on leashes, suddenly walking through my family room. We’ll see!)
I’m in my second autumn here in the house in Crazeysburg, so I’m guessing that my neighbors know now that I won’t be raking any of these many leaves. I sort of just rely on Nature to disperse them (into everyone else’s yards, I guess). And then I rake up what little is left in the Spring! (In my own yard!)
That’s just how we roll around here — since I must always be at my desk and I can’t bring my desk outside with me while I rake, God knows…
Okay! This is feeling like a really good morning over here, so I hope you have a terrific day, wherever you are in the world!! I’m gonna get back to work on the play now. I leave you with a photo from Halloween last year — early morning. (This is the side of my house, outside my kitchen porch.) All righty. Thanks for visiting, gang! I love you guys. See ya.
Last Halloween morning on Basin Street — it wasn’t raining!!
I am almost finished with the revisions to Tell My Bones. Unfortunately, the part I have left is the really hard part! But still, I’m really happy with how it’s gone.
I was thinking about those old stuffed animals on my bed from my post yesterday (by the way, I realized that I had 21 bedrooms in my lifetime, not 19. And then 22 if you count my dorm room at college, although i don’t really count that because I shared it with 3 other girls.)
Anyway, I was thinking about the stuffed animals and wondering how many of my original stuffed toys I might have left. I knew that, in the closet in my guest room, I have quite a few stuffed animals that were all bought when I was an adult. When I went to check, I found my old Raggedy Ann doll from when I was 7 years old. She’s the only one left that’s genuinely from my childhood. I keep her wrapped up because, as you can see below, her legs are badly deteriorating.
But she meant so much to me. My parents bought her for me as a gift and when I unwrapped her, I was so excited. Her face is all blurry like that because I cried on her so many times — whenever my heart was broken or I was lonely or being punished for God knows what. I cried all over her and hugged her to pieces. I remember that I took her to sleep-away camp with me, too. She was quite a comfort to me for a really long time.
I also took a photo up under her dress so that you can see her “heart” that says “I Love You.” Gosh, I really loved this doll. (She’ll be 52 years old at Christmas…)
Raggedy Ann from when I was 7 years old.Raggedy Ann’s heart
Okay! I’m done working for tonight. I’m gonna do yoga and then call it a (good) day. I leave you with what I’m listening to right this red-hot minute! I think he’s in his early 30s here. It’s a great version of this song, too, even though it’s from television.
All righty. Thanks for visiting, gang. Enjoy your evening. I love you, guys. See ya!!
Yeah, well. Remember how, early last summer, when the 2 practically free tubes of expensive cellulite appearance reducing creme arrived from the company in France and I was worried that it would work so well — because everything else under the sun that they’ve sent me either for free or practically free, worked so well that I then was forced to keep buying it because I am so fucking vain?
Well, I was worried that it would be the same way with the cellulite appearance reducing creme — that it would work too well. And it’s just too expensive to justify adding it to the long list of cremes and scrubs and masks and cleansers that I already buy every month from that company (and have been buying from them since 1999) because no one ever, ever, ever thinks I am 59 years old — and it’s not just because I’m immature. Which I am. But still. I’m talking specifically about my skin, here.
Well, as I posted the other day, I finally started using the expensive cellulite appearance reducing creme last week, and it really works. And I don’t know how it does but it does. It doesn’t make anything go away, it just reduces the appearance of it. But since I never go anywhere where my thighs are part of what you can see of me — because I am 59 years old, and even if you think I’m only 42 and a half, I’m still not going to dress in something that has my legs hanging out because I don’t want to look like I think I’m 17 and have an inability to age gracefully. (!!)
But for some inexplicable reason, when I got out of the shower yesterday, I sort of idly wondered what would happen if I put that creme all over my body, even though I don’t have cellulite all over my body. I don’t really know why I did it, frankly, but I did it.
And guess what happened? It made that little wrinkly spot directly at the center of my neck completely disappear. Gone. I now have the neck of a 41 year-old. I mean, it was awesome. I mean, holy shit!!
So guess what else happened??!! Yes, that’s right. I got immediately on the company’s website and bought 2 more tubes!!!! AAAArrrrgh!!! $47 plus $8 shipping for a single 6 ounce tube. And I bought 2, since the shipping charge would be the same. And God knows, I didn’t want to ever find myself in a public situation where that little wrinkly spot in the center of my neck ever, ever reappeared again.
I knew this would happen. I just knew it. The company makes incredible products, and 95% of it is plant-based, and they fix things — most of which you don’t even know you have problems with until they offer to fix it for free (one time) and your vanity is so intense that then you cannot live without the product because it fixed the thing you didn’t know you had a problem with.
They once sent me a free acne-controlling face mask. I don’t have acne and never did. But I love their face masks. So I used it and could not believe how great it made my skin look! So now I always have a tube of that in my medicine cabinet — $17 (plus $8 shipping) for 1 ounce of light blue stuff that fights something I don’t even have.
My medicine cabinet is 4 feet high — it extends up to the ceiling. It has 4 deep shelves, all of which are brimming with my many, many products from France (usually with a 2-3 month back-up for each product, because I wouldn’t want to even imagine running out of something and not being able to get to France).
I’m guessing that when my mom was staying here while I was in NYC, she probably had a heart attack when she opened the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and saw the absolute tidal wall of beauty products confronting her (and quite a few of the products weren’t even there because I took them with me to NYC). I have no drugs at all — except Flonase. I’m a drug-free kind of gal, relying instead on Jesus and my Inner Being to handle any medical emergencies that might pop up. So everything, absolutely everything in my bathroom is dedicated to my skin. (Well, I have a toothbrush, toothpaste and dental floss. But otherwise…)
It’s just un-fucking-real. And now yet another product has become part of that permanent beauty landscape. (But when I’m one-hundred-and-four years old, and only look 92 and a half, who will have the last laugh??!!)
Okay, so there we have it: Me, up to weirdness in the bathroom again, and another expensive habit is born!! All righty. I gotta scoot. I gotta work on the PLAY. Thanks for visiting, gang. Have a wonderful Wednesday wherever you are in the world! I love you guys. See ya!
“Thank Heaven For Little Girls”
Each time I see a little girl of
Five or six or seven
I can’t resist the joyous urge
To smile and say…
Thank heaven for little girls
For little girls get bigger every day
Thank heaven for little girls
They grow up in the most delightful way.
Their little eyes so helpless and appealing
Someday will flash and have you crashing thru the ceiling.
Thank heaven for little girls
Thank heaven for them all,
No matter where no matter who
Without them what would little boys do?
Their little eyes so helpless and appealing
Someday will flash and have you crashing thru the ceiling.
Thank heaven for little girls
Thank heaven for them all
No matter where no matter who
Without them what would little boys do?
I try not to get on Instagram or check email until my morning is well under way, because you just never know what lies in wait for you online that could just fuck up your whole day. You don’t really want to wade into those dangerous waters until you’ve at least had coffee and meditated…
However, this morning, for some reason, it was about 5:30am, and I was barely even awake, let alone out of bed, and I started scrolling through Instagram and almost immediately found a post from Brian Wilson, where he was quoting something Keith Richards had said and it just sort of happily set the tone for my morning.
Keith was commenting about certain very early songs by the Beach Boys that Brian Wilson had of course written, and one of the songs Keith mentioned was “In My Room.”
I had forgotten all about that song and I used to just love it. It was a “B” side, never a bona fide “hit,” but it was included on the greatest hits double album, Endless Summer. And that’s where I first heard the song, at age 14.
Of course, I got right on YouTube and played “In My Room,” as I lay there in the dark, contemplating getting out of bed.
It is still such a sweet song and it made me realize just how much of my life has been spent in my room. (My various online businesses and blogs have either been called Marilyn’s Room, or referred to my room in some way, for that very reason — my whole entire life seems to happen in my room. Try as I have to always move my offices out of my various bedrooms over the years, it always moves back in. I love my room!)
It also made me think about Keith Richards, whom I seem to have loved my whole entire life, beginning at age 11, when I’d read the monumental Rolling Stone magazine interview with John Lennon (whom I had loved since I was about 9). Lennon talked a lot about the Stones and Bob Dylan in that interview — and that’s how I really got introduced to the “real” Rolling Stones, not the “evil” ones that the media had perpetuated.
Anyway, from that interview with John Lennon, I managed to find the equally monumental interview Rolling Stone magazine had done with Keith Richards, at his infamous villa in the South of France, earlier in 1971.
Keith Richards, Villa Nellcote, South of France, 1971
You know, it was difficult enough to be 11 years old and try to truly understand John Lennon, a man I genuinely idolized; it was a whole other planet of astonishment being 11 years old and trying to understand Keith Richards, especially since I knew very little about the Stones at that point, and knew only a handful of their hit songs.
It is safe to say he made an overwhelming impression on me. I had to read the interview with a dictionary at hand, because some of the words he used I didn’t even know yet. (I remember that “decadent” was one of the words I had to look up, and it was used somehow in connection to Nazis and it took me a really long time — years — before I grasped what he was getting at there.) I also remember going to the library to find all the books & recordings I could on the Delta Blues singers. I knew most of the old rock & rollers and rockabilly guys by then, but the Delta Blues was new to me.
Anyway, it was cool to lay there in the dark this morning, listen to “In My Room” and think about Keith Richards and realize just how young he’d been when I was 11 (he was only 28!!) — he seemed ancient to me. Like he’d been alive forever… (this song is actually quite appropriate, isn’t it??!!)
Okay, so here’s a photo of my room from when I was 12.
My room, circa 1972
I was actually taking a picture of my dog, Brindle. However, you can sort of see my room. You can see that great old Zenith radio!! That was the actual radio I listened to, even though it was probably 20 years old by then — a castoff from my parents. (I never had any sort of state-of-the-art hi-fi equipment, ever. Even my record player was a portable, battery-operated thing.)
I still have my stuffed animals on my bed — from my actual childhood. Not “new” stuffed animals. I seem to have been reading A Blues I Can Whistle, which I recall I had to read for 7th grade English class. (I also recall that I loved the book!! Here is the synopsis: A young man, institutionalized after attempting suicide, writes about what happened the summer after his first year of college.)
And there is my little 3-ring binder, too, not only with flowers on it (because, after all, I was a girl), but also photos of Alice Cooper and his band –photos that had come with the record School’s Out — are taped to the front of the binder. (A pair of paper panties also came with that album!) The binder holds all the songs I had written by then. (What I wouldn’t give to still have that binder and look at all those old songs.)
So that’s one of my many rooms. As near as I can recall, I have had 19 bedrooms in my lifetime…
And for no reason at all, here I am at age 2, ten years earlier, at the first house in Cleveland. (I found it while trying to find photos of my room). A bag of Wise potato chips are in front of me, my favorite potato chips, ever.
Me in Cleveland in 1962
Okay. I’m gonna get back to work here. I hope you have a terrific Tuesday.
Oh, wait! Nick Cave sent out a Red Hand Files newsletter today that was extremely interesting and eloquent — a few words longer than last week’s. About shyness and his wife. You can read it here. (Interestingly enough, when I saw Nick Cave at Town Hall, his wife was sitting a few seats over from me, in the same row. And at one point, when he was talking about his wife being his Muse, he did a sort of impersonation of how nervous she was likely acting over being talked about publicly as his Muse, and she actually was doing that exact nervous thing right at that moment. And I mean, exactly. Sort of fluttery and stuff.)
Okay. So, thanks for visiting!! You know what I’m leaving you with today!! I love you guys, See ya.
“In My Room”
There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to
In my room, in my room
In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears
In my room, in my room
Do my dreaming and my scheming
Lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing
Laugh at yesterday
Now it’s dark and I’m alone
But I won’t be afraid
In my room, in my room
In my room, in my room
In my room, in my room
What a cool morning! Still tons of fog here, but it doesn’t look nearly as dramatic as it did before the sun came up. Actually, when I got up around 2am to use the bathroom, it looked really spooky outside. I guess mostly because I wasn’t expecting everything in the world outside my windows to have disappeared.
You know, Muskingum County is so intensely spirit-filled, just in general, that a little bit of fog goes a long way. It can turn cool into creepy in a nanosecond. And I’m not just saying this because I’m some sort of lunatic. Muskingum County — and especially Crazeysburg, with its “stopped in time” sort of feel to it — is unlike any place where I’ve ever been.
The ancient burial mounds all over the place have a lot to do with it, I think. The mounds here are sacred grounds to the Latter Day Saints, in fact. They believe Christ had his Second Coming around here, 2000 years ago. And it’s kind of uncanny, some of the terrain documented in the Book of Mormon that you can easily interpret as being all over this region, with all its ancient burial mounds.
And a couple hundred years ago, when the locals dug up some of the burial mounds on farms around here, they discovered the skeletons of giants — 9 to 12 feet tall. They were not Native Americans — meaning, people who migrated here from the general region of Mongolia and became known as “American Indians.” These skeletons predated that. The ancient people are considered Sun Worshipers. And they were sometimes buried with stone tablets that have ancient Greek and Biblical Hebrew symbols carved on them. So those giants were real old. It does sort of seem they had to have come here by boat, and they just have a number of uncanny similarities with what is documented in the various books within the Book of Mormon. (My in-progress murder mystery, Down to the Meadows of Sleep: The Hurley Falls Mystery, uses all that cool stuff in the plot.)
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Jesus appeared here to the ancient people, as is written. But it does mean that all of it is really, really interesting to ponder.(The Latter Day Saints are really just the coolest people. However, for me, their intense adherence to concepts of “sin” make it entirely unwieldy as a way of understanding life, and they seem even more dedicated to the need for procreation than even the Catholics are — and I think that rigidity comes from an understandable fear born from what happened to Joseph Smith.)
But I digress. And, plus, that’s only my opinion.
I have to say that within my lifetime, I have been all over Ohio, just all over it. And none of it has ever felt the way it feels here in Muskingum County. I’m not opposed to believing Christ appeared here. It seems he appeared all over the place after he died. The definition of “appear” is upon which all of it hinges. You know, even Paul says that Jesus did not go up to the sky as flesh & bone and then reappear in flesh & bone. It was as “spirit.” And certainly the Gnostics had a whole lot to say about the nature of how Christ appears. So that word and how you define it is key.
(And when you’re called to follow Christ, as I was as a 5-year-old girl in Cleveland, it is generally in spirit — for me, it was an aural & spiritual call; not a physical one.)
Anyway. A huge blanket of dense fog settling over Crazeysburg in the middle of the night, makes it all feel just that much more fascinating. My photos with my phone don’t do it justice, of course. (See post below from early this morning.)
Okay, well, I’m happy to report that there’s way more milk still in my fridge this week than there was on Monday of last week, so I’m guessing I’m not drinking nearly as much coffee. And so I guess that is a good thing. And I’m not spending as much time in bed, delaying that getting up & getting started thing. That’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing, just saying that I’ve stopped doing it.
I also wanted to report — if you’ve been reading this blog since early summer — that now that all the intense humidity is gone, I have finally been using that expensive new body creme that I got from the company in France (the company that I buy all of my expensive beauty products from and they do manage to take about 2 decades off my apparent age). Anyway, Kara was after me for ages to try the stuff and see if it worked. It is a creme that “reduces the appearance of cellulite.” (While I wouldn’t say that I struggle with cellulite, my thighs are indeed the cellulite capitol of the world and always have been, throughout all recorded time.)
Anyway, I finally decided to try it and it actually works. I’m not sure how, though. It doesn’t get rid of cellulite, but when you use it, it does indeed reduce the appearance of it. But if, like, the next day you don’t use it, you still have all the cellulite you’ve ever had. It didn’t go anywhere.
It’s really interesting to ponder and try to figure out how it actually works — and it’s made from plant products. But it’s very expensive so I doubt I will ever actually buy it once these 2 tubes of it are gone. I’m not usually in a situation where my thighs are the things on me that anyone’s ever really noticing anyway. I guess you never know what could happen in life, though, so it’s good to know this creme exists. (Although I shudder to think about what would be underway if suddenly my thighs were of intense interest to anyone…)
All righty.
Today is all about the play — well, mostly the play, and a little bit of yoga. So I’m gonna get started here. I hope it’s a great Monday, wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting! I leave you with an interesting concept: The Mormons singing the famous Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts.” If you have a minute and a half to spare, it’s worth listening to. It’s undeniably lovely. Okay. I love you guys. See ya!
The rewrites I need to make on Tell My Bones — the direction I need to take and the voices I needed to hear from my characters, are finally arriving.
I’m guessing that by the end of this coming week, I might even have the new version of the play entirely finished.
It is such an incredible relief when the voices you need to hear finally start talking to you. Of course, this means that all the other projects I’m doing will take a back seat for a week or two, but I totally don’t mind. It is just such a relief to finally move past certain difficulties I’ve been having — re: personalities involved in the play — and just concentrate on the PLAY. Make space in my head to allow the revisions to just come.
I’ve blogged here in the past about my singer-songwriter career in NYC, way back in the old days of the 1980s, and how naive I was back then about people’s ability to literally sabotage your whole career. And then how it started to happen again in the early days of my writing career, but at that point, I did what I felt I had to do to ensure that I didn’t get sabotaged again. I’m not going to go into all of it again here, only enough to say that I’ve been around long enough to know that it’s real. People do try to sabotage you.
You know, even if people aren’t consciously aware that they’re doing it to you, on some emotional level, because of their own insecurity, some people do want to see you fail. It’s up to you, of course, to allow that to happen or not. And because of naivety, I allowed it to happen to my music career, but I’ve never allowed it to happen again. But it’s that feeling of incredible disappointment, when you see it coming at you from someone you had no clue whatsoever there was ever any reason to distrust. However, in these few weeks since I’ve been home from NY, shit happened and continued to happen, so my eyes are open. For sure. Unfortunately.
I guess I really just needed to process that whole thing and find the best way to keep the relationship intact, but move forward with a better understanding of what is really in play, underneath it all.
Peitor’s brief phone conversation with me on Thursday really helped me get back on track and get my head together. (And I guess 3 hours of crying in the dark yesterday morning was the final processing of everything. And I can finally move forward. Allow people to be whoever they need to be, but move forward.)
So here we are.
Well, tickets began going on sale in Europe yesterday for the 2020 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds tour, supporting their new indescribably staggering album, Ghosteen.
If it weren’t for the fact that I will be up to my eyeballs with stuff for the play in NY by then, as well as overseeing the Writer’s Retreat either in Italy or England, I seriously contemplated the idea of buying a ticket to one of those concerts, just choosing a country I’d never been to before, and going.
But, of course, it is just indescribably impractical. And I feel completely, 100% confident, that they will eventually come to the States and add Crazeysburg to their line-up of venues. (We do have a Little League ball field here, with ample bleachers to hold all 14 of us who live here. So of course it will clearly happen. Patience is key.)
Anyway. Whatever. Who knows what the fuck is going to happen in my life by mid- 2020, right? I should try to just focus on the weekend for now. It is the final weekend of October and I just last night realized that I haven’t set out a single Halloween decoration. I keep thinking, subconsciously, that it’s still September. Oh well.
I’m gonna close this and get started here. Go down to the kitchen and get another cup of coffee. Thanks for visiting, gang. I hope you have a splendid Saturday, wherever you are in the world!! I leave you with this parting shot of Tom Petty, early 1990s, drinking a cup of coffee. (He was a Maxwell House drinker to the end — according to his second wife, Dana.) Okay. I love you guys. See ya.
Coffee! Always has been and forever will be the beverage of champions!
You know, one thing I ponder is how all the readers of this blog know exactly when I update this, when 99% of my readers don’t come here through the WordPress app, which of course alerts people when I’ve posted here.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I just find it curious.
So here I am. Life goes on. Although you have no idea how often I wish that it wouldn’t. Yet indeed it does.
I’ll be working again on the play today. The full scope of all those rewrites are finally taking shape for me. They aren’t necessarily “rewrites”, they are more “additions” — things that need to be peppered throughout the play so that I can add certain character arcs near the end, ones that only make sense if I plant the seeds of them from the very beginning. Leave intact what’s already written, but add things to it, so that the ending can be more pronounced, extreme, chaotic, beautiful.
I had some serious stumbling blocks with it yesterday (more to do with certain people involved with the play who I feel are undermining me, and when that kind of emotional stuff happens, it can be debilitating for me, creatively). I texted Peitor about it, just a simple line about how I was feeling. And he got right on the phone and called me from NYC, where he’s with family, attending a wedding, and he gave me the most breathtaking and straightforward and life-affirming pep talk that you can possibly imagine. It was just so beautiful and it meant so much to me. It really helped me get back on track with the play.
Still, I awoke this morning early; was out of bed doing the cat-feeding routine, the breakfast thing, all by 4:45am. Went back upstairs to meditate. Then I sat on the end of my bed still in my PJs, with my little Inner Being journal thing in my hand. In the dark. And instead of journaling and getting my day underway, I sat there in the dark and cried. I didn’t sob or anything, just cried — about all the people & things that are overwhelming me right now, the things I don’t understand and can’t understand, that I can do nothing about. All I can do is write; it’s actually all I have left. And I mean that in the most profound way.
Eventually all these projects will go into the next phase of the cycle of creation; books will be published, plays & videos produced, and at that point, my life will be involved in not writing, for a while. But for now, writing is all I have. I love it but it feels endless. And in some ways — since I have too many projects underway at once — it feels like several balls of yarn that have unraveled in my lap and I have to untangle them and get them back into tidy, manageable balls — or into scripts and manuscripts that are completed and tidy.
I finally realized that I needed to snap out of it, stop crying and go downstairs and get more coffee. And when I went down to the kitchen, I looked at the clock and discovered that I had been sitting on my bed crying for nearly three hours. I had not even really been aware that the sun had come up. Well, it sort of came up — it’s really cloudy here today.
Jesus Christ. Talk about productive.
Anyway. On we go.
I also spoke on the phone to Valerie in Brooklyn yesterday. And when I told her about the Thug Luckless porn project (because I need cover art and she’s an artist), she was very intrigued. She found the whole concept really funny. And we ended up talking about maybe turning it into either an adult comic book or adult graphic novel. The problem with the latter being that “novel” implies some sort of story and/or character arc, of which there are none. Yet. But she wanted to put that idea into the hopper, so to speak, and think about maybe committing to illustrating Thug Luckless as some sort of adult comic/graphic novel.
It would just be so fun but she usually doesn’t actually commit to those types of long-term collaborations with me. But we’ll see. (I know — I need another project, don’t I?)
All right, well. I’m going to get going here and look at the play again. I leave you with “As Tears Go By” since I’m still listening to Negative Capability, over and over. (It actually inspires me a lot. Not many women’s records do, for some weird reason.) (I like listening to women, but they don’t usually actually inspire me, in the true sense.) (Emmylou Harris and Janis Joplin used to inspire me.)
Anyway, back in the late 1960s, when I was a little girl living in Cleveland, we briefly had this great music teacher in school. She played guitar instead of the usual piano, and we sang all these rock songs. We were only about 8 or 9 years old. We sang songs by The Doors, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones. We sang “As Tears Go By,” which I had always loved. I was not conscious of who Marianne Faithfull was at that point, I just knew that a girl had sung that song when it had been on the radio. I knew who the Rolling Stones were, but knew very little about their music because they were, you know, the Devil. (I’m not kidding — we were taught back then by the media that the Stones were evil, just really bad people because they took drugs and had been sent to jail, etc.)
So we sang “As Tears Go By” in school and I thought it was a “girl singer” song. And then one afternoon, on the radio on the school bus, “As Tears Go By” came on and this time it was sung by a man! I could not believe it. Why was a man singing that song? By the time I was 12, I was a total Rolling Stones fanatic (although I had to be secretive about it, since they were so evil; I literally had to sneak Exile On Main Street into the house– I had bought it at Woolworth’s with my babysitting money and then had to hide it outside in the bushes to make sure my mom wasn’t around, then when the coast was clear, I grabbed it and ran it up to my room and hid it there. She never found out that I had it.) Anyway, I eventually learned that Jagger & Richards had written “As Tears Go By.”
I thought (and still think) it was so cool that she sang that song again all these years later on Negative Capability. It just sounds really amazing. And of course, when I listen to her singing it now, I recall who they all were back then, but mostly I recall who I was back then — when I was just a little girl in Cleveland, so in love with music. When I would hear a song on the radio back then that I connected with, it was like it washed over me like a tsunami — it overwhelmed me when a song truly connected. “As Tears Go By” was one of those songs. (Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” is another that springs to mind, from when I was about 7. That song would just stop me in my tracks whenever it came on the radio.)
So I guess I leave you with both of those. Thanks for visiting, gang. Enjoy your Friday, wherever it leads you. I love you. See ya.
Okay! Another day!! We’re gonna see if we can’t find some sort of balance here and do some writing that I end up keeping — not deleting — by the end of the day.
I think I’m working on Tell My Bones rewrites today. That seems to be what’s calling loudest to me right now.
By the way, Helen LaFrance will be 100 years old in just a few weeks. Her old church there in Mayfield, Kentucky, is planning a big birthday celebration for her. They’re going to send me videos of it, which the director will upload to the Tell My Bones website.
Oh, and also, please visit the web site and sign up for the newsletter! Even if you don’t think you’re likely to get to NYC to see the play — you never know!
(And follow it on facebook here. And on Instagram at tellmybones.) (Please!! And thank you.)
Okay. I just went down to get more coffee and the world outside looked amazing as the sun was coming up, so I went out onto the kitchen porch and took a photo of Basin Street (the light there in the tree is a street light, not the sun):
Basin Street from the kitchen porch just now, as the same came up.
All righty. I just got a text from Peitor just now, as his plane was landing in NYC, and he was trying to come up with loglines for our first micro-short production, Lita’s Got to Go. Here’s my favorite so far (although it doesn’t even hint at the key thing that happens):
“A psychologically disturbed woman becomes obsessed when she senses her housekeeper has been inappropriate with her furniture.”
(This is a micro-short piece of abstract absurdist humor, with that creepy Bauhaus cinematography. And erotic undertones.) (I’m guessing it will be 8 of the best minutes of your life.)
Oh, and by the way, I’m not sure now if the writer’s retreat is going to take place in Italy or not. There’s issues with the electricity there at the villa that Peitor is unhappy with, so he might be moving all the various retreats to a castle in Devon — in England. Of course I speak fluent Devon, so that would make my life a lot easier!! But we’ll see. Either way, it’s not getting underway until next year, so I’m still studying my Italian. I’ll keep you posted.
Okay, gang, this is short today because I want to get started on the play.
I leave you with my breakfast-listening music, “In My Own Particular Way”; a wonderful song off of Marianne Faithfull’s album from earlier this year (or maybe late last year?), Negative Capability. It’s an amazing album, by the way; really just sort of chilling but celebratory, too. And it’s one of those things that makes Instagram so great — I initially found out about it on Instagram because of following Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. (I find a ton of cool music by following musicians on Instagram.)
I met Marianne Faithfull once while I was working at MoMA in NYC. I think it was 1986; I was maybe 25 or 26 years old. Broken English had certainly already happened, and I think she had another album out by then, but regardless, she was this mega icon from my girlhood and I had just turned around and suddenly she was standing right there. She was smoking (you could still smoke indoors back then) and I remember she was wearing a leopard-print blazer of some kind. I was so excited, I blurted, “Oh god — hi!!” And she smiled and said, “Oh god — hi!!” It was really sweet and funny, and she had the throatiest voice since Dietrich.
I was a lot taller than her, though. I’m not sure why it bothers me that so many of these cultural icons from my youth are not taller than me. But anyway, she made my day. She even asked me my name. She was very nice.
Okay. Thanks for visiting, gang. Have a terrific Thursday, wherever it finds you and with whatever it finds you doing (or perhaps meeting!!). I love you guys. See ya.
“In My Own Particular Way”
Send me someone to love
Someone who could love me back
Love me for who I really am
Not an image and not for money
I know I’m not young and I’m damaged
But I’m still pretty, kind and funny
In my own particular way
In my own particular way
Capable of loving in my own particular way
And ready to love
At last
It’s taken me a long time to learn
In fact my whole life so far
So much rubbish I had to burn
So much I had to go through
Send me someone please who’ll love me
Someone who can see all my faults
But love me nevertheless
And we will love each other
In our own particular way
In our own particular way
Capable of living in our own particular way
And ready to love
At last
In my own particular way
In my own particular way
Capable of loving in my own particular way
And ready to love
At last
c – 2018 Marianne Faithfull, Ed Harcourt, Warren Ellis, Robert Mcvey
First. Work on the micro-short with Peitor went extremely well. We got great work done. We finished the 2nd segment of the script. 4 more segments to go. The 2nd segment is approx. 90 seconds long. Still not a word of dialogue.
And the 2nd segment relies heavily on the filmmaking style Antonioni used in his movie from 1962, L’eclisse. Did you happen to see it? I thought you had! I know how much you enjoy black & white Italian movies from 1962. (You know, the reason Peitor and I have been friends for something like 35 fucking years is because when he said he wanted the segment to have the look of Antonioni’s L’eclisse, I knew exactly what he was talking about.) (Except for the part when she’s walking down the hall, I want the shots to have more of a feel of Polanski’s Repulsion but without all the arms molesting her. And I know you saw that!!)
Catherine Deneuve in Polasnki’s Repulsion, 1965
By the way, our film is not in black & white. It’s just designed to feel like it is. And it’s not set in the 1960s, although our main character kind of is. (And as an aside, it’s kind of interesting that I didn’t end up like Deneuve’s character in Repulsion, all things considered. And even though today sort of sucks — overall, I think I’m doing pretty darned all right. However. If I end up wanting to eat an uncooked rabbit head that I’m carrying around in my purse, we can assume that things are at long last going seriously awry…)
Anyway. That was the highlight of the day — working with Peitor for a few hours.
My work on Letter #5 for Girl in the Night is frustrating me so I deleted all of it. I’m still going to keep the same premise for it (“Hymn to the Dark”) but it just kept feeling too plebeian. Sometimes plebeian is wanted. But not in this particular section of the book. In this section, I want it to feel like, I don’t know — the genesis of angels or something. I’m sure you know exactly what I mean. I don’t even know what I fucking mean, at this point. I only know I haven’t captured it yet. So I will spend tonight trying again.
I did manage to wash my hair and shave my legs and even pay some attention to my (hideously chipped) toenails for the first time since before I went to New York — over a month ago already! (Can you believe that it was one month ago tonight that I saw Nick Cave at Town Hall? Man. In some ways it feels like a year.) (I wish I could just persuade somebody to live my life for me while I just stayed in bed and reaped the rewards of dreaming.) (Except for the times when I go see Nick Cave.) But anyway, when the weather gets colder and I wear actual shoes most of the time, instead of flip-flops everywhere, I tend to forget to look and see if my toenails need re-polishing. And I also tend to not wear my glasses most of the time, so I don’t usually see much of anything. But today I got out of the shower and suddenly it was, like — holy moly. So I dealt with the toes.
Today is the 3rd anniversary of my sweet cat, Bunny, dying of a heart attack. She was the last of my house cats. I cannot tell you how much I miss having cats that actually interact with me. You know — the kind that let me cuddle with them and that purr and that like to sleep on the bed with me all night. Who look at me like they understand me when I chatter at them. Who act as if they actually love me. I just miss it so much. Even though Daddycakes was feral, he would purr and get on the bed with me a lot of the time, but he didn’t want to be cuddled or petted — he did allow me to do it, begrudgingly, so I tried not to overdo it. But, man. Feral cats are rough on the heartstrings.
Although, for the past several mornings, when it’s still dark out and I go into the dark bathroom to pee first thing, Huckleberry and Doris will come into the bathroom and lick my toes! This is a totally new thing. They will let me sort of reach down and pet them, but only once. If I try for twice, then they nip at me. So, you know, I’m trying to make the most out of peeing in the dark while they lick my toes… with those sandpaper-y little tongues.
This business of allowing life to be however it’s going to be without me orchestrating it to suit my needs… I’m not a big fan of it.
It sort of reminds me that I feel kind of at odds with what I posted this morning about Ghosteen. I even thought about deleting it. I wish I didn’t feel so deeply about things. I decided to keep it posted, just because I guess it’s better not to censor myself. To just “express.” I just think it’s such a beautiful album and I still don’t know how to process how it makes me feel.
And I wasn’t being mean about his wife’s dress. I mean, she does sort of describe it like that in that movie, not those 2 exact words, but they amount to the same thing — she had a sort of mission to have every woman wearing the same dress, and looking like some sort of prim cult from 40 years ago. I don’t remember exactly. But if you didn’t see One More Time With Feeling, then maybe I sounded really mean.
But that was not my intention.
Well, I guess I should either get back to work here, or do some yoga now. I’ll make up my mind momentarily. I just hope something wonderful comes out of this brain of mine tonight to salvage this frustrating day.
Oh you know, I saw something online today that the late painter Basquiat said about what the Lower East Side of NYC was like back in the late 70s & early 80s (that bombed-out, war-zone look), and there were some photos from back then included. This was when I lived down there, in Alphabet City. I just sort of take it as a given that people remember what it was like back then, but a lot of people who read my blog weren’t even born yet back then. So here is a really good photo of what it looked like on E. 12th Street back when I lived there (for 9 years). I don’t know this particular building’s exact location, but so much of the LES looked exactly like this back then. This could have easily been the “apartment” next door to me:
Somewhere below E. 14th Street, NYC, early 1980s.
It is so weird to think I simply lived like this. For so many years. I didn’t even think about it. It’s just how it was.
Honestly, a lot of the times I miss it. I don’t really enjoy what NYC has become.
All righty! I’m off to do something. I don’t know what yet. But here’s hoping that before the night ends, I will have written something worth keeping. I love you guys. See ya.
Well, from the sublime to the ridiculous — after all those mornings of not wanting to budge from bed until long after the sun was up, this morning, I was up and out of bed by 4:30. What the hell, right?
I guess just go with it.
I have a lot to work on today. Not only Letter #5 for Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse, but also Peitor and I are supposed to work on our script for a few hours this morning over the phone. (For our micro-short known variously as “Lita’s Gotta Go” or “Lita’s Got to Go” or “Leta’s Got to Go”, or the Swedish subtitle, “Lita maste ga.”)
Anyway.
Wow, Instagram sure was pink last night.
I didn’t stop working until about 10PM last night, and that was the first time I’d gotten on Instagram all day, and quickly discovered an ad campaign or Vogue layout or both for the Vampire’s Wife’s pink dress.
Then I awoke around 3am, thinking about that pink dress campaign and how it sort of has the feel of a visual offshoot of the Ghosteen album cover — soft, pink, harmless. Not that the album cover is pink but it does have pink in it and it does feel intensely harmless. Like it could be a mural on the wall of a child’s nursery. And it struck me that the two projects combined — the new album and its subsequent merchandising and upcoming tour, and the pink dress merchandising campaign — is not just the processing of grief, but inadvertently the merchandising of grief, on a huge scale.
You know how I ponder things, and sometimes I ponder things past the point of no return, because I certainly don’t want to see Ghosteen that way. But it is part of the job: you make the record, you have to tour, sell tickets, sell the merchandise, hopefully sell the record itself; earn your living (even a guy’s “gotta make ends meet/on Jubilee Street” right?).
The dress doesn’t really weigh on me as much. Although, I don’t support women’s fashion overall, whether it’s the puritanical conformity of the Vampire’s Wife dress, or the sort of horrific complicated torture chambers of Alexander McQueen’s fashions, and everything in between. I realize, at the bottom line, women’s fashion is really just about the mind of the designer, but the overriding consequence of “women’s fashion” still bespeaks of the trivialization (and sometimes the attempted annihilation) of the minds, unique identities, and bodies of women. You know, there’s just no way around the decades, and decades, and decades of that symbolism. I’ve always been attracted to style icons — Bianca Jagger in the 1970s rushes to mind — but an overall blanket of “women’s fashion” has always sort of repelled me (the primary reason I didn’t last long as a professional fashion model when I was in my late teens — my own agent, the man responsible for getting me employed, yelling at me in front of the entire office that if I didn’t like being treated like a piece of meat, I was in the wrong business. And he was right.). (And then my adoptive dad coming to town and taking me out to dinner and finding out that I was working as a professional fashion model: “If you want men to think you’re stupid, Marilyn, then being a model is the best thing to be.” Thanks, Dad.)
Well, anyway.
I do love where men’s fashions have gone in this current century, though. Men’s fashions used to be just as annihilating of a man’s psychological freedom, his spirit. And now, with magazine’s like Another Man especially, men’s bodies, their personae within the fashions, within the mise en scene, seem to have become liquid art. Just something so invigorating and uplifting to look at there. To my mind, at least.
But I’m digressing. I was just lying there at 3am today, thinking about Ghosteen and the necessary fact of having to merchandise it, and then wondering what on Earth that would really mean. Are you ultimately merchandising the death of a child? My mind can’t really even begin to go there. It was so disturbing. I’m hoping, of course, that the experience is something that helps audiences transcend some specific grief; find release, maybe? Not just be swept into some sort of oceanic abyss of emotion, being that it will be on that frenzied scale of a live concert. That ultimately uncontrollable emotional scale. (I’m guessing you can tell that I don’t go to concerts, either. They just have become this huge, unwieldy “thing”. A veritable sea of “too much.”)
Skeleton Tree felt so different to me, as a record. There was still a lot of grief there, but it did feel like individual songs. And even while they were equally abstract, there were songs that I could viscerally connect with in terms of my own life — “Girl in Amber,” “Distant Sky,” “Jesus Alone,” and “I Need You.”
Ghosteen just seems so sweeping and not as if it contains separate, individual songs that you can just sort of toss out there in a song lineup. And it’s just a devastating album — in its grief, its beauty, its overwhelming, abstract imagery. It might be easier if it wasn’t a sort of “concept” album; if it wasn’t a sort of microscopic focus on the byproduct of emotional chaos brought on by a child’s death. But I guess that’s sort of obvious, isn’t it — it would all be so much easier if it wasn’t that. Jesus. I just can’t process what it means to create a (hopefully) cathartic work of art about grief, about life, love, death; and then have to, you know, “take it on the road!” and wear a pink dress.
Just forever and ever, right? The death of a child has been unbearable. Psalm 137 (KJV) springs horribly to mind — and that’s from twenty-five hundred years ago.
Oh god. Some mornings,you know, life is just a wee bit stultifying.
But then I started thinking about David Byrne and how he has this really popular show on Broadway right now — American Utopia. I hope I get to see it. The Broadway cast album is out already, and it made me think of that Talking Heads song that I used to just love – “Don’t Worry About the Government”. Such simple times, you know? Early days in NYC. Life, even in its turmoil and awfulness, its drugs and booze and poverty and violence, was still new and still full of kinetic excitement for me and my friends. Daily.
But being in my early 20s, and being age 59 now — you can’t compare the two. You just can’t. There’s that pesky thing of experience fucking that comparison all up.
Still, it did make me go on YouTube at around 4am and play that song and realize that I still know every glorious word to it. And I remembered just how much that chorus meant to me, spoke to me, in those days.
Anyway. I gotta get started here. Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya!
“Don’t Worry About The Government”
I see the clouds that move across the sky
I see the wind that moves the clouds away
It moves the clouds over by the building
I pick the building that I want to live in
I smell the pine trees and the peaches in the woods
I see the pine cones that fall by the highway
That’s the highway that goes to the building
I pick the building that I want to live in
It’s over there, it’s over there
My building has every convenience
It’s gonna make life easy for me
It’s gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax along with my loved ones
CHORUS
Loved ones, loved ones visit the building,
take the highway, park and come up and see me
I’ll be working, working but if you come visit
I’ll put down what I’m doing, my friends are important
Don’t you worry ’bout me
I wouldn’t worry about me
Don’t you worry ’bout me
Don’t you worry ’bout me
I see the states, across this big nation
I see the laws made in Washington, D.C.
I think of the ones I consider my favorites
I think of the people that are working for me
Some civil servants are just like my loved ones
They work so hard and they try to be strong
I’m a lucky guy to live in my building
They own the buildings to help them along
It’s over there, it’s over there
My building has every convenience
It’s gonna make life easy for me
It’s gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax along with my loved ones
CHORUS
Loved ones, loved ones visit the building
Take the highway, park and come up and see me
I’ll be working, working but if you come visit
I’ll put down what I’m doing, my friends are important
I wouldn’t worry ’bout me
I wouldn’t worry about me
Don’t you worry ’bout me
Don’t you worry ’bout ME…
Marilyn's Room 