Inspiration: Sister Corita

I can not wait for Aaron Rose's documentary on Sister Corita Kent to come out. It's called "Become a Microscope". WHEN IS IT COMING OUT?!  

Corita Kent was a Catholic nun, an artist and an activist who taught at the Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles in the 1950's and 60's. She found inspiration in pop culture and American consumerism and then juxtaposed that imagery alongside spiritual texts to protest racsim, poverty and the Vietnam War. Naturally the Catholic church didn't always like this, and the head of the Los Angeles archdiocese, Cardinal McIntyre, called Corita a "guerilla with a paintbrush". That's guerrilla, not GO-rilla. 

Sister Corita , If I, 1969. Screen print. (© Corita Art Center)

Sister Corita,  Love Justice. Silkscreen.

In "Become a Microscope", Aaron Rose uses archival 16mm footage shot in the 1960's as well as interviews with Sister Corita's former students and colleagues to show her unique perspective about looking beyond the surface of things and finding beauty in the mundane. 

She said "Love the moment and the energy of the moment will spread beyond all boundaries." Good stuff.

Tuesday is Fantasy Day!

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a model-turned-painter and to have a country house in Upstate New York that you share with your talented photographer boyfriend and your adorable dog and you have a garden from which you prepare lunch and you look annoyingly cute in cut-off shorts and a big t-shirt and your house has that perfect bohemian artist quality without being too dirty or disorganized and you have time to work on your art and wander around the garden like a little woodland fairy? Me too. 

Wonder no longer. Thanks Todd Selby. 

That's Dan Martensen and Shannan Click. Jerks.

Thrifting: The Catholic Charities

As a rule, I normally don't enter any building with the word Catholic on it, but I checked out the Catholic Charities Thrift Store  at 609 E. Haley the other day and well, it was pretty gross. And expensive. Like $75.00 for a schlocky piece of art expensive. And gross like I thought someone was following me around and farting, but then I realized it just smells like that.

BUT I did find these oxfords that were priced at $12.99, and the man at the register rang them up for $6.99. I don't feel guilty because God must have wanted it that way, because I've been very very good.

I know Oxfords are way trendy right now and it's hard not to look like an unfeminine platypus whilst wearing them, but I couldn't pass up the deal. Or the chance to look just a little bit more like Sally Albright. 

The verdict:

Bring hand sanitizer and pray for mercy at the register.

Finding Rock Here: The Mother Hips

When I was a meek, dorky 9th grader, I used to sit in Dr. Littlefield's class (desks in a circle of course, this is California) and stare at Keith Nietupski. I don't know what it was about him-- it wasn't that I had a crush, necessarily, it was more that I thought he was cool, and clearly he thought he was cool, and I really wanted him to think I was cool, but he didn't. He frequently wore a shirt that said "The Mother Hips" on it, and I didn't know what that was, but I would always kind of nod my head knowingly and say "yeah, the Mother Hips", to which he would give me that blank high-school-boy look that meant "I can't even muster the enthusiasm to look at you disdainfully, but if I could, I would be looking at you disdainfully right now" and then would walk away.

I don't know why I remembered Keith and his shirt through the years, but it set off a chain of events that has a lot of meaning in my life, and I thank him for that.

If it weren't for his shirt, I would not have seen the band's name in the paper, grabbed some of my college friends at UCSB and then stood on a chair at Soho in 2003 with my mouth agape at the magical rock power that was unfolding in front of me. They sounded like this:

A few years later after moving back to Santa Barbara,  I wouldn't have gone to see Tim Bluhm play solo at the same venue and been deeply affected by his voice and his songs.  I bought  his album California Way, and I don't really have words for the way that it moved and inspired me. All I can say is I still get that weird tight feeling in my chest, like my heart is actually aching, every time I put the album on and hear the opening lines "Steinbeck's eden is dry and dusty..."

If Keith hadn't worn that shirt, I never would have learned about The High Sierra Singer-Songwriter trip, where Tim  and Steve Poltz take ten or so people to the wilderness for four days and hang out and write songs. That trip changed my life in ways too numerous to list here. But it looked like this:

I came back from that trip so inspired that I recorded an album! Please buy it.

I made very good friends on the trip. And then I made more good friends because of the trip.

I also got to know  Ms. Nicki Bluhm, who is now my favorite singer. She is the real deal, and she inspires me to get my shit together. I want to be just like her. She and her band the Gramblers are coming out with a new album soon, and I'm counting down the days. Their song Jetplane gets stuck in my head and I never mind at all.  I will watch this video 100 times a day until the album is released.

So if you want your life to change too, come to Soho tonight and see The Mother Hips play. Or, The Whale opens. I'll be in the front, come find me.

The lower Eastside

Santa Barbara's lower Eastside is generally considered the Dooneese of the  beautiful and affluent neighborhoods of our community--she is the ugly little sister. 

When the first Spanish explorers landed here, they saw a vast expanse of salty marshland extending east from what is now Ortega and State Street, down to the ocean, and they called it "dismal". If you're driving in to Santa Barbara from the south, you would probably think the same thing today, as the freeway brings you through the industrial and poorer residential neighborhoods before you get to the more scenic and tourist-friendly areas.

The minority population of Santa Barbara has gravitated to the lower Eastside since the 1920's, when the Mexican lemon packers at the huge Johnston Fruit Company Packing Plant built homes for their families nearby. Today it is still home to a large Latino population, and it also houses the town dump and much of Santa Barbara's commercial industry, including my office. On my drive to work, I pass machine shops, warehouses, auto wreckers and lumber yards. 

It can be gritty, but it's cheap (used here in the relative sense). Home prices for the lower Eastside hover around the $400,000 range, while nobody seems to have told the rest of Santa Barbara about the housing crisis.  As I've explored the neighborhood, I've started to realize how cool it is. Many of the homes are meticulously cared for with bright paint jobs and beautiful gardens.There are some great business that have cropped up in the past few years-- wineries, breweries, thrift and vintage stores. Obviously the taquerias are delicious and ample. The lower Eastside is what I imagine San Francisco's Mission District was like 15 years ago. It's still in that edgy state where it could go either way-- total  hipness, or a slow slide into more poverty and gang violence. 

I frequently catch myself thinking that I know every nook and cranny of Santa Barbara, and lament living in a small town.  I think to myself "man, if I were in a city, I could still be surprised, I could still explore." I have a real bad case of grass-is-greeneritus, which is of course why I started this blog, so I went out exploring the neighborhoods east of Milpas yesterday. 

Here is what I found.

I met a lady architect named Gale who said everyone on her street knows each other and they all look out for one another. She asked me from across the street, "what are you doing?" She was fun and friendly and has a Saab like I used to have.

I don't know if it was the rain clouds or the energy I felt exploring a new place, but I was overwhelmed by the beauty I found, even among the things that are typically considered unsightly. I kept thinking about Ricky Fitts in American Beauty when he said "sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in". 








All historical knowledge of this neighborhood was taken from Walter A. Tompkin's book The Yankee Barbareños

Gilda Speaks

"I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity." 

— Gilda Radner

Steve McQueen