55

“There’s nothing better than live music. It’s raw energy, and raw energy feeds the soul.”

— Dhani Jones

Coachella 2016 Mood Board

2016 wristbands just arrived! I'm very excited for this year's line up, per usual. This will be my 4th Coachella... what a spoiled brat.  I got sick in 2012 during my first year, but still had a great time with my boyfriend at the time. The last two years I went with a group of close friends and stayed for free (again, what a spoiled brat) at La Quinta (Thanks Kirs <3). Both years with friends were incredible. You pregame and get on the bus in groups, but in the crowds, you're quite quickly split into groups of 2. When you have a buddy that's on your same wavelength, it makes choosing what stage to go to, etc so carefree. 

Rob and I are VIP this year which will make for a different and even better time. Rob is also a massive Coachella veteran. He is even more of a spoiled brat than I am and has gotten his VIP wristbands for free every year (his fam used to own part of the polo fields that Coachella is held on or something). 

I get very stressed out about what I'm going to wear each day to the festival. It isn't just about making a statement, it's about being extremely comfortable in whatever I'm going to wear. ACCESSORIZING TO MAKE YOUR OUTFIT IS THE ANSWER.  Like you already know, Indio is a desert which means it is scorching hot during the day and most-likely freezing and windy at night. I've been successful in the past of making sure I know what the weather is going to be like so I don't find myself miserably too hot or too cold once I get onto the grounds. This doesn't mean I haven't had to buy a Coachella sweatshirt bc of the windstorms (I don't wear sweats... $65 down the drain). Ugh.

Anyway, we are going weekend 2 (April 22-24th). I get to see my boo Diplo headline TWO nights. I don't know if my heart can take it. Wish me luck.

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Coachella 2015

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Coachella 2014

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Coachella 2012

Disposable Camera Pix

54

“Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes. In order to be free, we must learn how to let go. Release the hurt. Release the fear. Refuse to entertain your old pain. The energy it takes to hang onto the past is holding you back from a new life. What is it you would let go of today?”

— Mary Manin Morrissey

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Still I Rise, Maya Angelou

53

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”

— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Pretty by Katie Makkai

When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, “What will I be? Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? What comes next? Oh right, will I be rich?” Which is almost pretty depending on where you shop. And the pretty question infects from conception, passing blood and breath into cells. The word hangs from our mothers' hearts in a shrill fluorescent floodlight of worry.

“Will I be wanted? Worthy? Pretty?” But puberty left me this funhouse mirror dryad: teeth set at science fiction angles, crooked nose, face donkey-long and pox-marked where the hormones went finger-painting. My poor mother. 

“How could this happen? You'll have porcelain skin as soon as we can see a dermatologist. You sucked your thumb. That's why your teeth look like that! You were hit in the face with a Frisbee when you were 6. Otherwise your nose would have been just fine!

“Don't worry. We'll get it fixed!” She would say, grasping my face, twisting it this way and that, as if it were a cabbage she might buy. 

But this is not about her. Not her fault. She, too, was raised to believe the greatest asset she could bestow upon her awkward little girl was a marketable facade. By 16, I was pickled with ointments, medications, peroxides. Teeth corralled into steel prongs. Laying in a hospital bed, face packed with gauze, cushioning the brand new nose the surgeon had carved.

Belly gorged on 2 pints of my blood I had swallowed under anesthesia, and every convulsive twist of my gut like my body screaming at me from the inside out, “What did you let them do to you!”

All the while this never-ending chorus droning on and on, like the IV needle dripping liquid beauty into my blood. “Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? Like my mother, unwrapping the gift wrap to reveal the bouquet of daughter her $10,000 bought her? Pretty? Pretty.”

And now, I have not seen my own face for 10 years. I have not seen my own face in 10 years, but this is not about me. 

This is about the self-mutilating circus we have painted ourselves clowns in. About women who will prowl 30 stores in 6 malls to find the right cocktail dress, but haven't a clue where to find fulfillment or how wear joy, wandering through life shackled to a shopping bag, beneath those 2 pretty syllables.

About men wallowing on bar stools, drearily practicing attraction and everyone who will drift home tonight, crest-fallen because not enough strangers found you suitably fuckable. 

This, this is about my own some-day daughter. When you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity, begging, “Mom, will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?” I will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer, “No! The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters.

“You will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing. But you, will never be merely 'pretty'.”

52

“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”

— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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Jalama Beach Camping Trip, Mid-March

51

“Anything I do, I spend a lot of time. I do it with passion and intensity. I want to be in charge.”

— Eli Broad

Image from Broad Museum site. (All other images mine.)

The Broad Museum opened up in September 2015 in downtown Los Angeles. Admission is free, but tickets are booked up months in advanced, especially for a weekend date. I jumped on reserving tickets before the museum opened. I have been lucky enough to go to The Broad twice, in November and in February, with two groups of friends. 

I was particularly excited to see the Infinity Room. I had gone to a Kusama exhibition in New York two years ago, and although I got to see much of her incredible work, the line for the Infinity Room was 3 hours long. This November at the Broad, I was again unable to see the exhibit. I learned that the only way to see the room is to get tickets for the museum for 10 or 11 am and claim a spot in line when you arrive. I was successful in February when I did just that. Rob and I had to wait 4 hours to see it (our friends decided to skip), but we leisurely went through the museum, had a lovely brunch at The Otium next door, and were texted when we could enter. It ended up being a lovely day.

After Rob and I had spent hours in the museum and seen the Infinity Room, we went back to my favorite exhibit in the building, The Visitors by Ragnar Kjartansson. We sat in the room for about an hour. I had been feeling extremely stressed and upset that week, sitting in the corner in the dark, surrounded by soothing music and beautiful images was the best therapy I could have had. I never wanted to leave. 

The Broad Museum gives a short description on their website: "The Visitors features nine musicians in various rooms at Rokeby farm in upstate New York, a decaying nineteenth-century mansion known for its romantic setting and gloomy charm. Each performer uses different instruments and plays the lyrics in their own deeply felt ways in one long, extremely impressive sixty-four-minute take. The screens in the gallery project all at once, resulting in a collective experience for the viewer. Together, the videos create what critic Hilarie M. Sheets calls an “entirely absorbing ensemble piece that was alternately tragic and joyful, meditative and clamorous, and that swelled in feeling from melancholic fugue to redemptive gospel choir.”

Although it doesn't do it justice, I posted a video below of The Visitors at a previous gallery. Skip to 3:40 for one of my favorite songs in the piece which also happens to be last song in the 64 minutes.

The Broad is terrific. If you live in LA or know when you will be making a trip here, reserve tickets. There's no need to wait in line to see the museum.