this will flash across the eye, e.g. feathery tailplume aflame.

in all earnest, i will attempt to fill out this form with some degree of fidelity. the last blotch of text to inhabit this virtual space was a choppy blathering of puzzling fragments that elicited a varied show of dissenters and admirers alike. thus far, this second-go is hardly shaping up much better...

i am one of those articulate girls with intelligent faces who gets glee from athletic exertion, i.e. can throw and catch with an intimidating measure of accuracy and finesse "despite" her double X chromosomes. i love fresh air and the steady endorphin-groove of long walks wherever there's trail and a wholesome absence of asphalt. i have lived for months on end out of a tent with a melodious backdrop of creekflow delivering me unto dreamhood and a good morning vista of live oak branches, amidst upcroppings of ferns and wild blackberry thickets -- and am admittedly distraught to no longer be privileged by such circumstances. this was in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in central California, (a hop, skip & jump from Yosemite National Park -- which will ravish you with its astonishing splendor), a place i will forever have exceptional and wistful fondness for.

(where sunflower seedlings grow into multigrinning stalks of towering proportions within a matter of weeks and the sky is: serious blue... that is, when it is not overcast with smoke and ash from the conflagrations that plague the region and any given stroke of lightning could be roaring up the brush at you).

the creekbank was a geological playground of jumbled boulders, upon whose granite bedrock you could find mortar holes that had been ground into them however many years ago by the women native locals. to have rushing water is not a slight asset where it is otherwise dry as straw and go figure this was where the indigenous people would likeliest head. the water was snowmelt from a 7000 foot peak upstream, progressively less frigid as the summer heated up and water levels dropped...

nude dippings were a matter of course for our motley nonjudgmental crew of fatefully united vagrants: our Teacup Falls a fortuitous basin with a sandfloor where you could stand and let a pleasantly-torrential waterfall gush over your head. ("Pimp my Creek"?).

it was here i apprenticed as a flower gardener this summer past in a deranged Intentional Community before the increasingly stressful social politics bade me (and comrades) flee the scene. in summary, it was a clash of the aging hippie generation who'd ceased their freespirited adventuresomeness and us vibrant, brainy nature-hipsters who had a little too much fun cavorting on their turf. at least that is my slant. there were many players in and facets to the showdown and i am sure you'd hear a different side of the story if you asked the resident commune patriarch, for instance.

nonetheless it was a vital experience as long as it lasted and taught me much about the sources of renewal and invigoration in my very cellular composition that had lain dormant for so many drab, suburban years. already i find myself slipping back into old habits i know are contrary to the lessons i learned and am still grappling with the drastic shift in environment that has me indoors and inactive most of the time when i'd supposedly rather not be...

carving key signatures into musical gesture.

BOOKS

The poems of W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, John Berryman, Kenneth Koch, Louis Zukofsky, Gunnar Ekelöf, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva, Thomas Lux, e.e. cummings, Christian Bök, John Ashbery and Conrad Aiken.

The philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Santayana, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Paul Virilio, Slavoj Zizek, Mladen Dolar.

The fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, Nabokov, H. P. Lovecraft, Elfriede Jelinek, Robert Musil, Oscar Wilde, Italo Calvino, Henry Miller, Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, David Foster Wallace.

MOVIES

Werner Herzog: Even Dwarfs Started Small, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzly Man… but watch out for Fitzcarraldo, the entire longdrawn second half consists in exploiting a crew of Peruvian natives to haul a steamboat over a mountain.

David Cronenberg: Dead Ringers being an absolute knock-out and masterpiece!! Videodrome, the Brood, the Fly, the Dead Zone… on a quest to view them all, though less impressed with Shivers (his first) and Scanners (unduly acclaimed?).

Almodóvar: Volver, La Mala Educación; David Lynch: Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, Elephant Man; Alejandro Jodorowsky: the Holy Mountain, El Topo, Fando y Lis.

Miscellaneously: Last Year in Marienbad, Harmony Korine’s Kids, Liliana Cavani's the Night Porter, Boogie Nights, The People v.s. Larry Flynt, Being John Malkovich-Adaptation-Eternal Sunshine-Synecdoche, Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, the Exorcist, May, Persona, Buffalo ’66, Donnie Darko, Grindhouse presents Planet Terror (R. Rodriguez) and Death Proof (Tarantino), Inglourious Basterds (excepting Brad Pitt’s pathetic, blowhard performance), Reservoir Dogs, Planet B-Boy, Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs.

MUSIC

J.S.Bach, Scarlatti, Pergolesi, Rameau, Händel, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Mahler, Richard Strauss (especially his tone poems and the opera Salome), Bizet, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Arensky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Sibelius, Respighi, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, Gershwin, Bernstein, Maurice Ravel, Poulenc, Ginastera, Villa-Lobos, Martinu, Hindemith, BARTOK, Webern, Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Olivier Messiaen!!!, Elliot Carter, Harry Partch, George Crumb, Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, György Ligeti, Wolfgang Rihm, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, Einojuhani Rautavaara!!!!, Stockhausen, Johannes Maria Staud, Mason Bates.

Cellists: Truls Mørk, Pieter Wispelwey. Steven Isserlis, Jacqueline de Pré; Violinists: Hillary Hahn, Maxim Vengerov; Pianists: Hélène Grimaud, Pierre Laurent-Aimard, Igor Pogorelich, Evgeny Kissin, Yundi Li, Yefim Bronfman, Glenn Gould; Conductors: Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel, Claudio Arrau, James Levine.

Hindustani and Carnatic (i.e. north and south Indian classical) musicians: Shivkumar Sharma (santoor), Ali Akhbar Khan and Amjad Ali Khan (sarod), Zakir Hussain (tabla), Hariprasad Chaurasia (flute), Lalgudi Jayaraman (violin).

Bluegrass/Old-time: Casey Driessen, Darol Anger and his Psychograss, Chris Thile, Bruce Molsky, Brittany Haas.

Swedish folk: VÄSEN, as well as Olof Johansson’s solo nyckelharpa album, Swåp, Harv… the Barcelonian accordionist Kepa Junkera…

Electronic: Autechre, Smyglyssna, Matmos, Squarepusher, Venetian Snares, Blectum from Blechdom, the ever catchy Goldfrapp, Cornelius

Instrument Creators: turntablist Walter Kitundu, Ken Butler.

Jazz: The Bad Plus, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, Red Mitchell who tuned his bass in cellistic fifths.

Rock: Buckethead, Les Claypool as well as his Frog Brigade, Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Judas Priest, Van Halen, progressive metal.

we might complement each other in some way.