Crazy girls of Echo Park, Part Two: Came home the other night to find SF, S and J barely able to walk, yet still planning to wander down to Walgreen’s and apply for jobs. I took pix, obv. (Coming soon!)

New bands: Dave D’s Marathon at Three of Clubs played host to Lower Heaven and Waverly. The lights looked real pretty. I took pix, obv. (Coming sooner!)

Pix for sale: My imagekind account’s been sitting by the phone wondering why I stopped calling… I relented and finally uploaded some bigger files (like the broken plastic flute and spilt champagne on a light table to the left) so now y’all can buy reasonably sized, affordably priced prints with ease. (Go now!)

Web design: Yvonne Dickson, London (Stylist) is awaiting the birth of her mutant web baby, threesmallapples.com. I’m the surrogate. We have big plans in the works, in between the transatlantic gossip. Also, I have a top secret design meeting rendezvous tonight for an entirely different project, about which I’m tremendously excited. (Shh!) I should really update my little web design section one of these days.

Utata! Front page! Oh my, I hope I don’t get disqualified for admitting that I wasn’t actually looking through the camera when I took the picture.

Until my first trip to the front page, I just thought it was real neat (see, I’m learning American!) that the pictures were going beyond just looking pretty and were inspiring words, too. I never really thought about how good it would feel to read something inspired by my dumb pix — when it happened it hit me over the back of the head, in the most outstanding way.

Buzzcocks, overheating, margaritas, throwing up in Camille’s gutter, “Up in Smoke” at Noni’s, dead fish, not quite punching people, blah blah blah.

[Big Sur, part six] Left Fernwood and followed Jesse to a birthday party on a cliff top. There were horses to the left, llamas up the hill, the Pacific below and a meteor shower above — seriously, how does a little girl from Essex end up on a cliff above the ocean watching a meteor shower? I got lucky somewhere down the line.

There was a horse-shaped climbing frame that Saxon and Truman lorded over as a truck with a keg and a gaggle of teenagers pulled up. As the sun went down we settled into sofas and mattresses to watch the shooting stars fly. A girl with the same name as me first tried to lead Tiger down the cliff and the flipped herself over the back of the couch on which we were lounging, half suffocating and entirely freaking the hell out of Electra.

Anyway, that sunset was the prettiest thing I ever saw until the next night on the Hill of the Hawk. I swear I saw bats but they were probably just little birds.

After dark I couldn’t take pix anymore so got all antsy and I started to explore a little, flashlightless and narrowly avoiding falling over or down anything substantial. I climbed a little hill and when I reached the top heard some unknown party saying “It’s the Russian in me that makes me want to take my clothes off” so I climbed back down again.

(I later climbed back better equipped with Saxon leading the way, I think, and gingerly headed into the open-doored and apparently empty house at the top. There were wine labels and a hand-drawn map of Germany on the back of the bathroom door, and New Orleans post-Katrina stickers on the front.)

The kids really wanted to leave so leave we did (E was bored and regretting not bringing her Harry Potter book) — we followed Dave D’s car back down the cliff and into the forest, with the weird girl’s boots sticking out the window the whole way. Colin and Michelle N were reported MIA so the drivers decided to leave without them — they hitched back right on cue for campfire madness.

[Big Sur, part five] This was one of those frustrating evenings where I was quite gleeful and somewhat giddy but, seriously kids, I doubt I’m the only person who’s ever been known to sip from a bottle. I love the taste of bourbon for sure but I’ve never been a shot taker.

Anyway, Dave D kept taking the whiskey away on the imaginary grounds that I was drinking too much–insisting something about how I was supposed to be the photographer, what?–not realising that whenever it came back to me I sipped a little and then set it down besides me, where it would remain for ten mins or so until he’d declare I’d been hoarding it and take it back again. Dave C was on to it and kept laughing. Max christened me Whiskey and was convinced I was taking silly, self-indulgent photographs of the fire when actually I was taking silly, self-indulgent photographs of the crazy people gathered around it.

Apparently it was my fault that the Jim Beam cap was lost, despite the fact that I was handed the bottle capless from Colin and only one of us later fell down a cliff… maybe the cap’s in the creek as we speak.

I was, however, just about silly enough to keep checking on The Baron, who had turned in early for the night. I kept waking him up to check he was still there and hadn’t been kidnapped by hags or wolves or anything. He didn’t once yell at me. I”ve been studing fairytales too long; there will always be a part of my brain that’s convinced the woods are a bad, bad place full of singing foxes, cottages that walk on chicken legs and cursed guitars of doom that play themselves.

I actually left the “party” fire and went over to the “family” fire for a while, alone with my camera, and foolishly tried to think of how to take a picture that could show that weird and sinister feeling, but I just don’t know how to use a camera well enough yet.

Then Colin rolled over the edge of the cliff and we couldn’t find a single working flashlight. Aiyayai. I got overwhelmingly warm and took off as many layers as I could while remaining decent before realising that the heat was centered around my right foot, the one I’d been leaning against the firepit. The sole of my boot’s only half melted. The next morning I felt great, which will one day count for a lot in my lunatic Big Sur photography book.

Street art photography from Krakow, yes! My source of all Krakow, Poland, knowledge is Phreneticus, and he says that the one smurf is saying something like “Go fuck yourself, old man” to Papa Smurf — it’s a quote from the Polish president.

Krakow has my favourite stencils of any city so far. Did I just get lazy and start ignoring them in LA? I don’t remember London anymore… Anyway, Prague has great stencils and stickers and other creative vandalism, but Krakow wins for now.

Echo Park, California: I seem to be living in some kind of time-warped, melodramatic soap opera recently and it’s rather draining. I think my character’s the wayward but misunderstood older sister with big hair, or something.

The soundtrack’s by Big Star and Autolux, programmed to summon subliminal rental car memories of Big Sur ocean-view road trips.

Hannah’s been in Fiji, though, and it sounds excellent so please read her blog instead.

LOOK! RIGHT THERE! PIX OF CUTE KIDS! IN BIG SUR! AT FERNWOOD!

[Legs it.]

Echo Park, California: Duck and cover.

[Big Sur, part four] After much running ’round giggling through the grass on the Hill of the Hawk with Miss Amelia (who earlier had been quite affronted by my calling her “Missy” until I told her I’d be calling her Missy up until the day she has a ring on her finger and Saxon to start chanting “Mrs Amelia! Mrs Amelia!” at the top of his lungs on the bank of the creek), I found myself lens-cap-less and forlorn.

While sitting on a sofa in some strange cliff-top house with masks grinning down from the walls and frantically pulling nothing but Pfeiffer Beach sand from my bag, I dragged The Baron back out to the field to help me search for the long lost lens cap of doom to no avail. Standing there with a flashlight as night drew in, confusion started overwhelming everything. It didn’t matter that much, of course, but two days amid that many trees with that little solitude were starting to get me down and to be frank I’m not even sure what happened in the next ten minutes.

Somehow, though, I was back out through the house to the cars, exchanging shoes for boots and readying the troops for a trip to the sacred trees [see “Subjective Magic” for more on that.]

When Dave asked me what was wrong I’m not sure how I answered except that when the cars were rearranged and I walked away towards my waiting chauffeur I said over my shoulder “If you see my lens cap, let me know” as a joke, cuz everyone knows lens caps don’t reappear once they’ve been swallowed by fields of long grass in the dark on Hill of the Hawk.

He said “is that all it is?” and as I reached the car door he was behind me, lens cap in tow. “Amelia had it,” he said with a grin; “My glow stick has water in it!” said she.

Well, that threw me into a stay-or-go quandary, because I couldn’t tell if it meant “completion” or “new beginning” (too much I Ching makes it hard to be decisive.) Eventually the Glow-Stix Kids and the Flash-Light Gang marched single file into the woods, and The Countess turned the page.

[Big Sur, part three] All weekend up at Fernwood in Big Sur, people kept talking about Hill of the Hock and how we were going to go there and it was going to be wondrous and astonishing, and I kept trying to figure out what a hock is exactly. All I could think of was something being “in hock”, and I couldn’t fathom why you’d want to name an allegedly “special” hill after that, unless maybe the land was bought by pawning something. (Of course, “hock” is also a verb that means “to disable by cutting the tendons in the ankle”. Nice.)

When we eventually arrived, after much hoohah and kerfuffle, the sign above the gate read “HILL OF THE HAWK” and I remembered that I’m very far from home and don’t really understand a word anyone says out here.