BAD GIRL lit

∞ 5/6/2012 (10:12am)

Yesterday I bought Santigold’s new CD “Master of My Make-Believe.”  I loaded it onto my iPod and embarked on a nice run in the 75-degree weather.  A quarter mile later, when THIS song, “This Isn’t Our Parade” was playing, I tripped and flew headfirst onto the concrete sidewalk, spraining my knee.  So it’s kind of weird listening to it now, but I still really like it.  And this weekend hasn’t been a total *bust* because I got to spend lots of time with SAM (who thought I had a spinal injury and immediately jumped in her car and took me to the hospital) and then force myself to relax after the busiest two weeks at my job.

∞ 5/1/2012 (7:22am)

Busy weekend.  Even busier week.  Many updates, but until then, “Take Care” (Florence cover of the Drake/Rihanna song)

∞ 4/27/2012 (6:14am)

Ingrid Michaelson tonight w/ Jamie. 

FINALLY.

∞ 4/23/2012 (11:25pm)

“Pane dolce” means “some love” in Italian.  It was also the name of the coffee shop closest to me in Sherman Oaks - just two blocks down Woodman and a left on Ventura.  The Latino couple who owned and ran the place didn’t mind that I sucked out their wi-fi in exchange for a drip with skim.  I plugged in and parked by the window, watching housewives walk their dogs and overhearing wannabe producers taking meetings.  I was a stereotype myself: 22-years-old, just-shy-of-Ivy-league-school educated, moved across the country to be a fill-in-the-blank.  I won a short story award in college; I had no business parading my senior-year-screenplay around.  The men of Pane Dolce never asked me questions.  One day I was tip-typing and I heard drum rudiments over the music on my headphones.  Maybe I felt it - the double-roll of a fork and knife on wood table.  I looked up from my laptop.    A young woman with a red bandana wrapped around her dark, asymmetrical greasy hair had taken a break from a massive plate of waffles, strawberries, and whipped cream and was playing drums. It was back in my “try to make friends with anything that moves” phase and I asked her if she played drums.   I did.  She told me to sit down.  She said she worked here.  She said her name was Xolie Morra.  ”Xolie” is pronounced like a “z” meets a soft “c.”  She told me she was playing a show that night at the Whiskey a-Go-Go.  I had never been to a show on the Sunset Strip.  I ran home to change into cut off shorts and a baggy tank top over a maroon lacy bra.  She drove me and a 6’6” 20-year-old named “Tall Willy” who played back up guitar for her.  I went along because that’s what you do when you move to Los Angeles with zero responsibility, and she was the closest to resembling Shane from the L Word (the embodiment of LA cool, I thought.)  Xolie could have murdered me. Instead she killed me with her music.  I am practically an expert on female singer-songwriters, and I have never heard a voice like Xolie’s: deep, surprising, pained, and instrumental.  She even plays the “mouth trumpet” (no, not innuendo, though she is most certainly a lesbian with an amazing girlfriend Saundra.)  Only several times a year am I stunned by a performance (most recently, a monologue about a robot president, but that’s for another post.)  Well, what is my point?  I forgot her.  I went to several of Xolie’s shows, and then she moved to San Francisco or Portland and even though we’re Facebook friends, I will likely never see her again.  But when I watch this video (to the left) I remember that feeling of confusion - how a woman with a voice that rivals Brandi Carlile’s with the gut of Amy Winehouse was serving chai lattes.  If she had made it to LA, how was she not discovered, signed, and touring?  If I sat in this cafe and wrote until my fingernails curled under the keys, who would read any of it and who would care?  Because for every 22-year-old who blindly gets into your car and drives to an open mic, there’s a crowd of people telling you they’ve already heard it, already read it. That won’t sell, this has been done.  I believe in every bag of sand there is a speck of sugar.  And I want to taste it first.

∞ 4/22/2012 (10:45am)

Like these accidental meetings up and partings of the way
Are not so much our choice but in the blood of how we’re made,
It’s like the way I have to write down almost everything I see
So that the record does obscure the thing the record used to be

emmy the great.paper forest