rocks. just rocks.

I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne.

Different phases.

--where she paints her cheeks and hennas her hair, and slows her paces long enough so that darkness pools in her footprints. And she sends her pale hounds away and calls her red hounds to heel. And the bear is caught dangling in a net, while the scorpion falls beneath a dozen angry snouts. And she waits throughout, in a knit of shadows that stains her pale dress. And then bends, with her pack, to a hideous feast.

Thanks...

...for seeing an old baba into a new year.

Eau de Gerda.

Beginning to think that The Snow Queen is less about devotion than abduction? Well you'd be right. What is it occurs in the mind of a woman past a certain age that makes her frantic for the possession of bottled youth?

It's the strictures of fashion, isn't it? Raise those necklines, loosen those cinches. You'll find an immediate drop in the urge to distill the Essence from every rosy cheek. And a generation of Gerdas free to ramble while a gracefully aging Auntie Horde retires to fireside respectability.

Beside it the wreck of the Hesperus too.

Loose lips sink ships,
and curse pencils to repetition.

Brave (new) world.

What does it say about a person's work when he tries for innovation and ends up mulling around his roots? Not much, I suppose. Experimentation is nothing if not starting from the beginning.

A thunderous clap would have been nice, though--to herald The Tempest.

Proud Parent

This weekend witnessed the rebirth of jessicagadra.com. Alex sat grim-faced at his post, hands hovering over the myriad shining tools--and I paced the linoleum with loosened collar and wild eyes. There are still a few wrinkles to smooth, but the goal of updating has been achieved.

Check out the headers. The idea to use handwriting was an Alex original, and I think it was well done--softens the antiseptic bent, livens things up. Though I'm not convinced that the standard cast of fineline piggies and frogs really gels with my psychopathic script.

Hiccup.

Pay no mind to the stream of nearly-the-sames that is about to come. There's method behind it. Changes are being made in the matrix.

Wontcha come out tonight?

Cheers to the Birthday Gal!

You really DO always come back!

For those waiting: Sept. 21, 2007.

No one's interested in something you didn't do.

Shockingly, The Poetic Edda and The Gormenghast trio are providing weak creative ballast. Not that I wouldn't recommend them to the staunchest wordsmith in need of a nap, but not for the sketchbook are they. One operates on the most massive of scales while the other travels in an obsessively tight circuit, and I like my 'verses somewhere in the middle, preferably in a tame European countryside--hedgerows optional.

So, back to the Snow Queen, and more productive weekdays.