Leilani Clark

So I just found out that there was a book recently released all about karaoke. Here is the link to the author’s blog if anyone is as interested as me in this topic:

http://www.karaokedomination.com/blog/

Of course, this tip from the woman who KICKED BUTT at the Last Day Saloon on a dull Monday night with a fully-choreographed version of “Just a Gigolo” by Louis Prima. Yes, that woman was me, and yes, I do rule at the art known as the “empty orchestra.”

In Sum:

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers

I’m working on a “familiar” essay about utopian communities in Sonoma County. Truly fascinating stuff and information I’m contemplating turning into a longer work. Here’s something I discovered about a utopian community established about twenty miles of north of Santa Rosa.

The following is an excerpt from my as yet unfinished essay:

“The establishment of Fountain Grove was just one wave in a swell of migrations by utopian communties to the beautiful dry valleys of Sonoma. The Icaria-Speranza commune arrived in Cloverdale–about twenty miles north of Santa Rosa—in 1881, after the Icarians were forced to leave France because of their political views. Less a spiritual community then a socio-political endeavor, the Icarians followed the teachings of French socialist and philosopher Etienne Cabet, who developed his theories on ideal community in the 1840 novel Voyage en Icarie. As the editor of the newspaper the Populaire, Cabet influenced the radical principles of economics and society set forth in Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto—a text that went on to alter the course of world history. The colony thrived until 1887 when, ironically, economics and a lust for private property tore the group apart.”

I have an article in this week’s Bohemian on North Bay recording studios. Sweet!

The Hills Are Alive: Our Guide to North Bay Recording Studios June 2008

I’ve been reading a book called “The Urban Homesteader,” and they mentioned a place called the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. Basically, this guy from Sebastopol builds minature, fully-planned eco-friendly houses on wheels, with bathroom, kitchen, sleeping loft, etc. In the book, the authors were encouraging people to take over plots of land in the city and plant them with fruit trees and vegetable gardens and put tiny houses on the land, so that the land becomes more important then the house itself. I love this idea. I’ll try to post some pictures of my favorite tiny houses later.

In his introduction to The Best American Essay’s 2007, guest editor David Foster Wallace introduces the label “Total Noise,” which he uses to describe the yowling multitude of voices that surround the average American in our technology and media driven society.

“-a rate of consumption which tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total Noise that’s also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value. such basic absorption, organization, and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen—at least that’s what I got taught. Suffice it here to say that the requirements now seem different.” (xiv)

I see two options when it comes to Total Noise, a third lies in there as well, but I’m to lazy to examine more then two options at the moment.

The first involves a sort of cultivation of A.D.D. (Attention-Deficit Disorder—or, the new natural way of existing in American society) by submerging oneself completely into the teeming sea that is media culture. Obsessed with Brad and Angelina?(Brangelina for those in the know), then just go for it. Study the pictures of them, wonder about their awesome and fabulous lives, allow yourself to talk about them as if they are real people. [Hell, I had a dream about Angelina Jolie last night where she was super-pregnant (just like on the cover of Star magazine) and I reminded her about how she'd bought a poster of the Bandit Queen I'd made with another friend years ago that was in an art show in LA (true story) and I was asking Angie if she still had it up on the wall. And she said she did, and she was impressed and wanted to be my friend.] Yes, celebrities have invaded my dreams. I’ve given in to the Total Noise. Throw yourself to the sharks. Watch Dancing with the Stars, America’s Next Top Model, Oprah, Celebrity Fit Club—just do it, watch them and learn, be in the moment. Throw concentration and attention out the window. We are evolving past the need for these qualities anyway.

The second option involves a type of “monkish” medieval seclusion from infusion of Total Noise. I’m reading Marilynne Robinson right now (and will continue to obsessively write about her for the next couple of weeks) and she lives a life of seeming hermitude and seclusion. She knows the King James Bible. She goes to church. She says she doesn’t read contemporary authors. She certainly doesn’t keep a blog—and she writes Pulitzer-Prize winning novels like Gilead. Robinson remembers concentration and focus and the way it can help us trudge along the path of becoming more conscious, productive and creative humans. Total Noise does not affect her, in a deliberate cultivation of immunity. I am probably making grand assumptions about a woman I don’t even know, but the type of writing she produces could not be produced on the fly, between viewings of Pimp My Car and Living Lohan. No, I picture her in a room with one window and lots of books. A quiet room where thought is still given priority seating. Total Noise pushes at the locked door, begging to be let in, making itself harmless and inticing, but the door stays shut.

So does anyone have any tools for cultivating concentration in the midst of the incessant pull of mindless internet searching, television watching and the general yowling of what we call media?

The “Divine Winery,” as Erik Davis calls it in the previously mentioned book The Visionary State, sits on a grassy hill below on Round Barn Blvd. Surrounded by modern business parks and new trackhomes and apartment, the building is tagged and burned beyond what seems normally acceptable within Santa Rosa city limits. We explored the ruins yesterday, the place where Thomas Lake Harris brought his Brotherhood of the New Life to live in what they called Eden. Harris saw fairies on this land, where palm trees mix with tall evergreens, where squirrels and birds play aggressive games in the trees.

In 1899, after accusations of scandalous behavior, the messiah-like Harris handed over the land to a man by the name of Nagasawa. Nagasawa rebuilt the winery and went on to be called the Baron of Fountaingrove. The ancients casks where thousands of gallons of wine were stored still sit, hunched and waiting amidst the debris and rats, to be filled again with the divine wine of the Brotherhood. The entire ruins carries the feeling of halted respiration, as though it will begin breathing and living again at any moment. Harris taught his followers something called “meditative respiration,” a sort of breathing that would bring them closer to the celestial grace of the universe. I think the remnants of this belief remain in the very core of the wood and stone.

We made only one tour of the place. Although the sun shone high and strong, I got a serious case of the heebie jeebies. I kept expecting to see ragged, misty faces looking at me through the cracked windowpanes. I love that feeling.

Santa Rosa needs more ghosts. Leave the old buildings, let us explore and learn, let us see the layers of life, the fascinations and passions that existed before we walked on the land.

Yesterday, after hearing stories about Tom Waits and the “Waits” room (the recording site for Mule Variations and Bone Machine) from the owner of Prairie Sun out in Cotati, I got so inspired I had to stop by the record store and buy a copy of Mule Variations. I never listened to this album when it first came out in 1999 or 2000. I was broke as hell and not buying many records if they weren’t put out by my friends. The recording is strange melange of muted sound (which was achieved through the acoustics of a room in an old converted chicken closet, I found out) tinkering botched up piano, and of course, Waits singing in that achy ballad style so adored by many. I also picked up a copy of the The Band’s self-titled album cuz I’ve been itching to hear that again for a while. And Bon Iver’s For Emma, forever ago a gorgeous solo guitar record out on Jagjaguwar Records, that sounds like the winter heartache you never want to go back to, but always do.

For the past few years, I’ve spent time in subconscious and overt examination of what it means to be Californian. I haven’t come up with any answers yet, but I like reading books that lend insight into the west coast feeling that I like to call the “California Lifestyle.” Visionary California: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape by Erik Davis is made up of a series of essays about different spiritual sights in the Golden State. Davis writes in a manner reminiscient of Rebecca Solnit and Mike Davis; his tightly woven words mix humor and intellect in a fulfilling and provocative way.

Davis says: “What is important about California is the interplay between the visionary imagination and cultural invention, and how this creative fancy introduced an enchanted and sometimes sacred dimension to an often tacky world of cheap thrills, commerce and trash. As a place that has always been imagined as much as it has been lived, California is, perhaps, inherently visionary.”

More to come on this topic later…

I have a review of the Scarlett Johannson (sp?) album where she covers all Tom Waits songs in the latest Bohemian. I tried not to be mean because my urge was to be mean. Why? Maybe I’m jealous. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood that day.

Johansson Review