nika states

My room is a terrarium, a big cat enclosure, a blue-half-bird-cage. I have all the light and the heat and the neigbour’s Shakira and the wind fucking the palm fronds together outside, me supine on the soft carpet, the deflating mattress. At night from one wall of windows I can see into the backyard of the people on the next block over, there is a plastic chair beneath the green porch light, above the grass that fails to be green, sandwiched between the hard silhouettes of two low outbuidings, and in the mornings the hills lie wet and spiny, lady-like beneath the fog somewhere, where I have family on a twisting upper road. I cannot see their house but I have called their voicemachine, and I am waiting for their advice. I have ninety-nine-cent plates and glasses, I have my underthings in a heap in the corner, I have a shiny new toothbrush. The girls that walk by the house all seem to be chewing at gum and there is something funny about the boy with his hydraulics crawling over a speedbump, bass going humpahumphump. Earlier down McArthur there were men in the middle of the street with their shirts off, they almost looked oiled but it is hot out, so they are really just like me, only smarter. There are other things, but I haven’t found them yet. There is time.

selene states

I’m flying to England tomorrow (today) to watch my big sister get married. Jeff is being warm somewhere in the other room, and my things are in boxes. When I get back in about a week I will pack them in my car and drive them to my new place in Oakland (tiny room, all windows, space for a full sized mattress, wonderful) and maybe stress out about where to put them and when I’ll have time to look for jobs and what the hell kind of classes I’ll be taking in two weeks time, when I start at Mills.

Holy Moly.

Celeste Deruisa

“AUDREY IS A HOBAG”

feat. Celeste Deruisa

Celeste Deruisa

I do hope none of you were laboring under the delusion that my work is in any way dignified. Sasha Volynets, who took this, knows the squatty truth.

Sasha Volynets

Sasha Volynets

Our friend Jon recently had his second annual 30th birthday. I (typically) made a fuss about our being late 20 minutes, which turned out to be wholly unnecessary. I used up the last of the first roll during dinner, though I was not able to save any frames for the adventures of Mitsubeero and his nemesis Vinyard, mighty warriors fashioned, respectively, out of: a beer bottle, napkins, chopsticks, chopstick paper/ a wine glass, napkins, chopstick paper, maraschino cherries, melted ice-cream, and american spirit rolling paper. I felt a little sorry for our servers, who were undoubtedly a little confused, but I am young and therefore always totally complicit in these things. 

jeff lindsay

cool heather

i lost my camera battery. shooting exclusively in analog until the new one arrives . a few shots from a few weeks with a canon ae-1 and some fuji superia reala to follow.

This morning I dreamt I was in a stone city, a drunk place high in the mountains, with little air and creepers raking the walls. I laid the guitars, dulcimers, awkward wooden flutes, and myself against them, bare legs on tiles walked too many times and then left too long in the distance, turning now to gravel. Others were there, but I didn’t bother with them. A little bird came to me - or maybe it was not small. The size of a young cat, but downy, sweet and brightly tottering. A little bird. It pecked at my fingers with a thin beak, a little kindly, a polite request. Peeping. I led it into my lap with breadcrumb thumbs and it settled there, lightheaded and hungry, I rummaging in my bag with one hand and offering the other for more pecking. We were both very happy, resting in that place. Then the blurry man in the bed roused himself and took his fidgety hand from mine, went into the living room for cereal. I tried to go back to the city with the old stones and the fluffed bird, but I could not find it anywhere. I slept without any more stories. Only I am a lucky one, and when I woke properly I went out to find him tapping at a laptop, and good things were had.

kevin johnson

This weekend I am sorting boxes full of clothing, dresses from goodwill and the salvation army, smaller shops in Heidelberg, Walnut Creek, and Topanga. Some of these will go to consignment shops, and some will be donated. Most will hopefully go in the yard sale. Other things with which I am parting include the entirety of my old playmobil collection, a number of breyer horses, a dozen or so cloth-bound history books. From the driveway, my sneezes sound a bit like shrieks, and in a way they are that - my body protesting these old things, that the parting has taken so long. I am twenty-one and a few weeks old, sleeping in my mother’s spare room for a few days, asking things to leave me behind.

Last week I was accepted into Mills College for the 2010-2011 term, and if all goes well - if I can afford the tuition, the cost of living in Oakland, the textbooks, and the time, I will be there at the end of August. I’ll move out of the little flat I’ve shared with Jeff and Grue right when the air starts cooling, with little trouble and less time, probably, because it’s just cameras, guitars and clothes, and half of those are closeted in my car. I’ll miss things, but I am so very pleased and excited - a little lightheadedly, and when I found out, in the car between Ben Lomond and Fall Creek, my camera battery disappeared. So I have been shooting with an older apparatus, a Canon AE 1, and have not yet had anything developed. There are pictures of poison oak, life jackets, people on pedal boats, smiling things. They will be telling, I think.

Last night, after the heat died, a laid myself down with the skinny, blind-deaf dog at my feet, my mother in the armchair and Cool Heather all tight with energy, in and out of the room. There was something wrong, something ineffable and strange curling inside me. My mother said “You’ve been sorting through those things all day. Old things are hard,” but I hadn’t felt much of anything, even looking at old pictures. Wasn’t I nostalgic? “No, not really,” I said. “My life is so much better now. Nostalgia would be a little stupid, on my part.” 

And I felt a little lighter then.

fame

Josh Comer

Sam Rucks

I am going north in an hour or so and leaving the light from the bedroom for the weekend. All of these walls and doors are white but there’s something transformative in summer and the right time of day. This apartment is mostly hotter than the outdoors, except when it’s much, much colder, but there are things I love, and I think about London and Nashville and Austin, other destinations, I think about these things but sometimes it is nice to stare at your wall and feel very fond, to stretch out your hand in the middle of the night and feel it beating cool against you. I have done this since I was a child, in all different places. Even with someone in the bed a hand splayed on a wall in the dark is a strong kind of solitude.

julian perez

Forest Devil

In 2008 I stumbled upon a six-song self-titled EP by a band called Night Beds. I could find virtually nothing about them online, and worse, I couldn’t even remember how I came to possess the mp3s - only that one of the songs came up on shuffle one day, as if out of nowhere. I spent a lot of that year and the next racking up a pretty serious play count on those few songs, in the car driving La Honda to the sea, in the hammock with my arms and legs all wet with pre-dawn condensation, on many different sideways. Eventually I was able to find out a little more about the band; they made a more accessible myspace page. Matt Wilcox (previously of Matt and Isom) and Winston Yellen (at one point recording as Winter Boat) seem to do most of the work, though at least one other young man appears in a youtube video, and their myspace page recently has been changed to read a third member (Aubrey Swander). 

Occasionally someone creates music that instills in me a sense of real thirst - both for more of the same and for a train of imprecise images, something else I would not be able to identify or talk about. The Night Beds EP is exactly that, and I waited what felt like a very long time for what I wanted very badly, but now it’s here. This week saw the release of Every Fire; Every Joy, which is every part what i hoped it would be. You can download it for free at everythingthatisnothere.info. Please do so, and then tell your friends.

jeff lindsay

jeff lindsay 

• Sometimes the flat has a fainting heat, and I stay as low to the ground as possible, shower sitting down in shirt and underwear, in cold water, again, again. In the afternoons a mad herd of suns undulates in the black glass on highways, the hills leonine again, softly alarming. Young men in big shirts come down Chiquita with their jingling carts, I am always going somewhere else, with sad eyes for popsicles and bottled water gone sweet in the passenger footwell. I have been waiting for all of this somehow, to come home with thick air and sparse clothing, to lay face down in the dark with dying ice-cubes between ribs and sofa, for the girls downtown to wear their tube dresses without shivering, for us all to be bare and nonsensical, swallowing that glare all day until the evening settles and we let it spill right out of us. This is rightly called a golden place, but it needs the summer. It never knows how much.