(no subject)

This weather really, really makes me miss Alaska in the summer--this is like an early August evening in southeastern Alaska, with the wind moving restlessly high among the treetops and the air neither hot nor cold.  I feel a little pretentious saying I miss it, because I was only there for that one summer, always as a transient and never as a real resident, but it gets into you.  In that place I held an eagle in my arms, its head to my heart, how could it not lodge itself within me?

Despite the rugged Alaskaness of the weather, today I was a total city kid, going to Liquid to become gloriously orange again, Chinatown for fabric shopping and downtown for dress and sweater shopping.  No dresses and sweaters were to be found (well, I found sweaters I liked but was disciplined and wouldn't buy one if it wasn't exactly the sort of I-know-it's-out-of-style-but-I-want-one-anyway long cardigan I was looking for), but hair is orange and I have fabric, though I'm second-guessing myself on the fabric now.  I want to revamp my look a bit for Raks Spooki, in black, silver and orange because I have orange hair flowers, so I was looking firstly for orange glitterdot fabric to make a fringe belt out of and secondly for interesting fabric for some kind of panel or overskirt.  No orange glitterdot, but I did get a black slinky knit full of orange glitter for the skirt deal.  Except I keep going back and forth over whether it's really orange, or just brown.  I am hoping that with the orange glitterdot next to it, it will be orange enough.  I wanted to buy a rotary cutter as well, but the man at Winmill reacted in horror when I said I didn't have a board and could i just use cardboard instead, and I wasn't brave enough to buy the cutter anyway when he said absolutely not, you will dull the blade too quickly.  It's not like I cut up enough fabric to make that really an issue--i'll just get one online, and he'll never know.

Listened on the T nonstop to the song I'll be doing with Walter Sickert and His Army of Broken Toys on Thursday at the Skybar--I'm really looking forward to this.  Did I mention before that the song is about Tituba, the slave upon whom the blame for all the blasphemous misbehavior of the white girls was laid at the Salem Witch Trials?  I have a total narrative in my head for the song, which may or may not fit the actual lyrics, but I'm finding it profoundly satisfying to act out this particular story.  I hear in the song the spirits finding her on the ship from Africa and staying with her and betraying her in the New World, or perhaps not so much betraying as letting her down until she has nothing left but herself, and even that isn't her own, and then she perishes.  I'm working in a little zaar stuff in the part where I think the spirits have left her, she performs this ritual in her distraught grief but it brings her nothing except perhaps more evidence against her.  Well, I never said it was a cheerful narrative, did I.  Some of my ancestors were longterm New Englanders so I look at this as a way of acknowledging and maybe in some small way apologizing for her pain and mistreatment and that of countless others like her.  Up here in the North we like to forget that slavery was legal here once too.

Well, on that cheeful note, time for dinner, and then off to a party, continuing my day as a city kid.