Travels in the Solarium

So, yes, when I was a boy my father lived in a house at the very end of long, tree-lined street. It backed onto a hillside, overlooking the sea. This was on 7th Street in Montara, for anyone who knows Northern California well. The front door had been painted with a sun's face by the previous tenants.

A girl named Marina lived next door (the youngest of three blonde daughters). She was a few years older than me and used to play tennis, alone, at the high school down the road on the weekends, swatting balls against the side of a wall for practice and returning up the hill, in the evening, red with perspiration. At night, I would often dream of her whispering beneath my window and try to figure out ways for her to get up through a second story window or how I might get down. I remember imagining ladders often: the ludicrous but somehow folkloric image of a girl carrying a ladder down the street from one garage door to the next in the moonlight.

Anyway, at the back of my father's house was a greenhouse whose frosted windows looked out on the backyard. The sliding door that divided the kitchen from this place was usually left open, so that you could see from the living room, in an open plan, over the kitchen table and into the this golden, warm, planter-boxed and herb-scented place--a liminal room halfway indoors and halfway out.



It was here we sometimes ate in summer (pulling the kitchen table out), also housed a puppy named Julie in a crate after I picked her out of a litter of week old labrador retrievers--my father saying it would be best if we placed an alarm clock in the crate with her, under the blanket, to remind her of her missing mother's heartbeat.

But the greenhouse for me was, above all, the best place in the world to read. I still fantasize, even now, about going back there to quietly devour books, the sound of a rustling willow tree in the garden, with its empty hammock, audibly swaying, like an echo of the sea just a short walk away. Reading in the greenhouse, just as an idea, as a possiblity, is a little bit of heaven I carry around with me to this day.

Januarium

Just some images from the last roll which best represent my life at the moment. Still looking for work, for a solid base. For a place to breakfast and quickly sit down to work.


Actually, I've now moved my typewriter into the bar where I work most nights in an effort to get more writing done...I'll be there now before the bar opens trying to bash out the next novel.

Alive and Well

But feeling the pull of undiscovered countries at moment, and wanting to find some pocket of peace, something existentially like the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. I used to go there as a child, pining for the rice crackers and jasmine tea we had at the end of every visit.

Here I am with my youngest niece a few years ago.

That Sunset Feeling

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Just some pictures I found while 'researching' underground Seventies music. These two photographs were taken at a Sikh commune in the States (lots of ex-hippies running around in shawls, singing and dancing, unloading tents from Volkswagen trunks).

Catch a Boat to England

The other night at the Co-Op on Walton Street, I heard two pretty girls singing this tune in harmony beside the lettuce and tomatoes. They were, I thought, too young, too effervescent in their fur coats to ever know such a song as this, first recorded by Jackson C. Frank in 1966, on an album produced by a very young Paul Simon. It was beautiful, a little shock to hear I song I know so very well being sung, shared among others. I wanted to ask these girls where they had heard it, but refrained. They were, I think, busy waiting for someone to buy them cigarettes. Then a few days later I found out that Laura Marling, also young, also from down the road (in Reading), had just released a version of Blues Run the Game on 7 inch vinyl.

Personally, I doubt anyone (other than girls beside the produce section in mini-markets) can do much better than Simon and Garfunkel's majesterial but unreleased version of the song. Nothing quite like hearing two voices sharing a sad but resilient melody together.


Jackson C. Frank

Laura Marling (clip)

Simon and Garfunkel

Nick Drake

favorites/favourites

Winter Wings

Birds in the park.

A dream of spring in the air.

Warmer breaths, less clothes, postcard hearts.