no.241 | Loss and Found
I can’t remember the last time our rose bush bloomed. Along with its close companion the pomegranate, they flowered with simultaneous and exuberant purpose this Spring. My dad’s dad loved English roses and carefully nurtured them outside his trailer in Magnolia, Texas. Ours just came with the house. Yet, it surprises us every few years with a rush of life. Spring is not as stark a season in Texas as in the Pacific Northwest or places with real winters, but April comes with its small rewards and reminders of life’s cycles and caprices.
I don’t know how my father felt about roses. He was deeply interested in the inner workings of machines and how wood is cut and combined by hand into arched window shutters and fine mantle pieces. My father passed a few weeks ago after a long struggle with Parkinson’s and related dementia. His body and mind were gradually and then suddenly diminished. He was lovingly attended by his wife, Jenise, along with many friends in a lovely hospice nestled in the woods in Bellingham. I found great solace in the trail just steps from his room.
Our relationship, like most, was complicated. I am choosing to focus on moments of light that punctuated our time together, especially in these last few years. This piece for PSO combines an improvisation recorded on a recent rainy day on the porch in Austin, mixed with a kind of ephemeral flutter recorded on my dad’s porch with his somewhat broken guitar, which was originally released as PSO no. 61 published in July of 2019. The images are a mixture of our roses and an image I made from dad’s porch, which overlooks Birch Bay, this winter.
10 Things Found Comfort In During Hard Times
House show potluck featuring Garrett T Capps, Frank Hurricane, and Cactus Lee. (I made cookies and maybe a few friends.)
Robyn Hitchcock’s charming memoir, 1967, which takes place during the year he was twelve and discovered rock and roll and himself at boarding school. Kinda like School of Rock meets Harry Potter meets Brian Eno.
Singing and playing music with Paul and Leslie at Co-Lab Projects’ fundraiser dinner at Cisco’s. The most amazing food and cocktails on the planet for the best cause in the art world.
Hospice nurses, CNAs, nurse practitioners, and so many soldiers of mercy who do so much often for so little.
Artist Run Club, especially our adventure to Diego Miró-Rivera’s Conversation Stones. We will have a show that opens with a morning run on Saturday, May 3 from 8-11am.
School of Song classes: Songwriting with Brian Eno and Home Recording with Phillip Weinrobe, both life-changing teachers, but the best part was the song shares, where you are set up with 2-3 others, chat roulette style, in a breakout Zoom room and you listen deeply to each other’s songs. Can’t recommend enough.
Fresh pizza dough from Central Market.
Rawhide and Roses, the community radio show put on by Jo Harvey and Terry Allen in Pasadena, California, in the mid-1970s.
Photobook ATX, organized by Sean Perry from ACC and Bryan Schutmaat, brings photographers into conversation in front of a live audience. Everyone has been a delight and inspiration.
