berlin

I just got back from ten days in Berlin, where I met my pen pal of nine years, Noa (who is the greenest bean in the bunch). My first night there I went to bed at nine at night, woke up at five in the morning, when it was still dark and Mitte was still sleeping it off. I put on a kimono from the 1920s over my pajamas (what else does one wear in Berlin at 5:00 AM?) and stepped outside my hostel for a cigarette. Within thirty seconds a tall man came up to me and asked me in English if he could speak to me. We ended up going for a coffee across the street at a bakery which wasn't sure whether it were open or not. He talked to me of his childhood in Zambia, how he would make soccer balls out of bits of trash and inflate them with a tied-off water hose, how he saved some baby guinea fowls whose mother had been killed by dogs, about banana trees and his sister's suicide. He turned out to be a classical pianist in town for a concert performance. His name was Kampambo, and we talked til the sun rose, he with a sheath of battered sheet-music under his arm, I in an old tattered kimono-robe and bare legs, in the middle of one of the coolest cities on the planet. When we parted ways, he asked if he could kiss me, and I turned away. He kissed me inside the tattoo on my shoulder shaped like a square instead, something Thomas always used to do. I told him I wished he could have met Thomas. He said, "I just did. I met you, and so I met him." An auspicious beginning to one of the best trips of my life. 

 street art

more street art

excellent 1960s and 70's tvs and computers for a pittance!

penpal noa on the train with a chinese lantern plant i bought her

noa on a donut night, sporting a bag i sent her years ago which an ex-boyfriend gave me...

berliners are fond of decorative dashboards.

elections are coming up and nearly every candidate is sucking dick

accidentally beautiful colors and shapes on a chipping wall

graffiti detail on wall

a dashboard shrine to nature, one assumes

jesus is alive and well with his co., you know, living in noa's dad's apartment building in berlin

objets d'art, including a good-luck bracelet bought at a flea market made of camel bone and lapis, brought back from a trip to india in the 1970s by the woman who sold it to me

o 50 kg sweet nectar

19teens japanese pants at the coolest shop ever in berlin, which i am going to purchase from afar

something else i will now buy from home, a bird-claw-holding-a-stone talisman. the kind of thing i would have bought/stolen for thomas.

yourz truly making a shrine for tom in a monk's cemetery in mitte, which developed every day. note the coil of sandalwood incense... 

a note telling our story, placed in the heart-shaped tree stump shrine

very sweet note.

***
Every person adored me in Berlin, why? I don't have an answer, but that seems to be the way it goes when i travel. I bought the coolest objects, wait til you see them, you'll plotz. How am i going to do a whole year in a commune now? Now all i want to do is move to Paris and open a shop...

thomas and katie and thomas

 

So, my beloved boyfriend of six-and-a-half years, Thomas (and beloved/much-irritated-at ex-boyfriend of one-and-a-half years, also Thomas), died this past May-- May 29th-- of a morphine overdose. I'll never forget getting the call from his sister, who found him, and his mother. She just said "Oh, Katie," and I knew right away what had happened somehow, and just started screaming.

Those first few weeks were a real horror show. Forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep, waking up crying and having weird dreams, afraid I would start to forget him or cease to love him if I didn't think about him all the time. The trance-like memorial in the cemetery; putting his ashes into an old 1970s bon-bon tin with the Love Is... kids on the lid, licking ash residue off my fingers after spreading some and feeling his bone-bits in my teeth all day. Spending time with his family; meeting the 17-year-old girl he was dating when last he was alive (horrors). Missing him terribly, thinking magically, and basically longing for things to be different.

 His family life is fascinating, and so is his personal story. My view of him was so intimate and so oddly intertwined with my own identity that having lost him is still not real. He was an artist, a dreamer, an asshole, a lover, a wonderful poet, intensely charismatic and attractive, a performer, a musician, the father of my two unborn children, great in bed, madly funny, imperfect, human, genuinely intelligent, a liar, insanely articulate, heartbroken/permanently homesick, and absolutely wonderful. 

I'm starting a book about him which I have been planning since he was alive and we were together, a memoir-type of thing. I have the title and have had it for forever (though at the time I didn't have the ending yet), and he loved it and would love that I'm doing this. I haven't put pen to paper yet specifically in the little Mead notebook which I bought to start the project in, and I'm feeling overwhelmed at the thought of culling and refining all of this life-stuff, but I need to get started already and want to get started and can't wait for the world to meet him-- I feel like it's going to be great and lovely and big.

The above picture is Thomas and I in the snow one month before we broke up for the last time a year and a half ago. I was three months pregnant there. He was so pissed, because he thought the plan was to take the picture of us kissing lying down in the snow, but I had positioned the camera for us standing up.(That says a lot about our relationship in the post-drug years.) Beneath is a poorly-scanned photo-booth picture of us from four years ago (I was also pregnant in that one, come to think of it).

He was my baby-baby, and I hope the book turns out as well as I feel that it is going to. (Below, I put a rabbit pelt on Tom's head in a very serious manner, at age 18.)

turkish delight pink pie mountain head

More from my inspiration journals. Let's get inspired and go burn something down, maaaan.

 

1) Becky, my long-term, recently deceased, much-beloved boyfriend's mother, in the early 80s. She was a runway model and an avowed punk in London, Paris and NYC (where she worked as a shopgirl at IF boutique, among other things) from 1982-1988. Her long-term boyfriend during this period was the lead singer from A Flock of Seagulls. You'll be happy to know she is still legitimately beautiful and crazy chic at 52, so it can be done.  2) Spread. 3) From a 70s children's book which never ceases to inspire. 4) My older sister in high school in a dress we found in our old home's attic. I really kick myself all the time for not hanging onto that when we moved... 5) Nice hair idea from Archaeology Today magazine (is that title an oxymoron?). "The poppy goddess", can you dig it?  6) From a book about Mayan/Incan civilization: "Human dancing in his way as White-Three-Dog." TOO GOOD 7) Another photograph from Becky's files, part of a series an artist-friend in NYC did, something involving hooking people up to televisions..? I should ask her more about this.

HIDE NOR HARE (KRISHNA)

I was watching a film ("Coco avec Chanel") the other day. Chanel cuts her hair dramatically at one point, and someone says something to her along the lines of, "Ooh, watch out!: When a woman changes her hair, she changes her life." There's a lot of truth to that (though I don't think it's strictly limited to the fairer sex). Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about doing something along these lines, though a little more subtle, about half the area: 

...From materialdearth.blogspot.com. When I was in India, I would see all these gorgeous women in their elegantly draped sarees with shaved heads, and thought every time how remarkable it looked. When I got back from India, I was emotionally devastated for about nine months, trying to reconcile my experience with my normal life. It took me a very long time to come out of that; just recently, to be honest. There was a period there when I thought very seriously about just going and applying to a Buddhist nunnery in a small town in Nepal, shaving my head, taking a vow of silence, renouncing creature comforts and the material world. While I've come to realize I don't want to take it to that extreme (just yet, anyway), there's a part of me that feels very at home with the idea. 

   Across cultures, head-shaving is an act of contrition, of sacrifice. I know it's a little bit of a trend at the moment, this hairstyle-- Alice Dellal, ya ya ya-- but I think, to me, it would have a meaning, something personal, a symbol of moving forward by giving something up, and acknowledging that in a tangible way. Perhaps I just want a pseudo-philosophical excuse to do something rash. Either way, I'm going for it.

black milk of daybreak

Today I found a persimmon tree in the forest which had a perfectly triangular stone coming up out of the ground at its base and I took it as an omen and tried to meditate there, but it was raining and it just felt too dramatic. Heading to Philly on Friday for just one day for a top secret mission (fig) that I hope turns out well (water). (Picture above of a grow-your-own crystals kit; below, of one of the girls in the Cottingly fairies scam rocking a hairdo, and a dream-forest.)

I rediscovered this poem by Paul Celan today. Most poetry I find overly poetry-like, but this resonates with me because of the actual sounds of the words in my head/mouth. It lends itself to being chanted. I'm not trying to be all Alvy Singer dragging Annie to the depressing film-- I think if you take it apart from its reference to reality it has this dream-like quality, and that is what it is that I love. (Picture below of an illustration of Vasilisa the Beautiful at the hut of Baba Yaga by Ivan Bilibin. Cool torch she has there. In the story I think the skull talks to her.)

I don't mind if no one ever sees this or reads it, because really it's just another way for me to selfishly record moments for my future-self. I wonder what will happen to all the ephemera like this that gets put on the internet, what of it will get recorded for a while, and who will see it in the future, and what it will mean then. If you do come across this I hope the rest of your day/night is totally magik. (Pictures below of Pat McGee shreddin, and then some khipu, Incan knot-writing [which, like most ephemera, is indecipherable today].)

SO SUK IT I AM BEDDING OUT

many snakes

It's in the nineties here in good ol' Tennessee, and not even May yet. My friend Miri and her boyfriend Johnny came to visit for a couple days over the weekend. They had just come from South Africa, where they had been seeing Miri's family, and they brought back some Five Roses tea and Tennis biscuits, apparently staples there, as souvenirs. I just like the names.

There was a crazy yellow moon last night, and it was hot. We went on a trek through the woods to the Red River, where we went swimming and saw many snakes. (The camera got wet, but the moon was still in focus.)  I was able to use the old Red Cross flag I bought a few weeks ago as I intended to when I got it, as sort of a wrap in which to bundle up. 

Red sky at night: sailors delight. Red sky at morning: sailors take warning. I had a dream last night which I don't remember well, but I woke up sobbing. Let that be a warning not to fall asleep watching Gummo.

mustard greens

Here is what I am feeling at the moment: 

 Mushroom hunting knife from Kiosk;

Amazing early 90's noise band t-shirt which I am fruitlessly trying to track down;

Emily Hope wearing something great, on the perfect quilt (all the pictures in her shoot are killer) from backyardbill;

 Detail of the monogram on a chemise from the late 1800s which I found on Etsy today, and bought, and am thinking of turning into a cropped top;

 Ilse Jacobsen rain boots from Lambs Ear Shoes;

 

This fellow's style is through the roof! From the Sartorialist.

I don't know: kelly green, off white, punk/dirty/worn/old, and workwear? Last month I was thinking red/fur. I bought a huge Red Cross flag made of linen from WWII to wear as a cape/wrap, a pair of red long underwear from the 1970s (with a dropseat!!) which, surprisingly, fit me perfectly and cost 16 bucks, and the shoes below, again from Lambs Ear (There is apparently no apostrophe in their store name, which gives my grammatical self a headache, but they are amazingly curated, so I guess it evens out).