I Am Actually Good - Christine & The Queens Bring French Pop to You

One of the best French things to take from my trip, I actually picked up in a fab flat in Chelsea. Ever on the pulse of things, Hugh & Fred hooked me up with this little gem burning up the French art landscape.  Christine and The Queens are giving us infectious French pop with a little early-stage Michael Jackson style in a mix of performance, art videos, drawings and photography. The video for Christine or Tilted, the English version, is one of the coolest videos I've seen in ages. 

Oh! Would that I could pull of Christine's (real name Héloïse) tomboy look! Good god, I love a loafer! Perhaps I should dig mine out of whatever abyss they've made their way to. Or, perhaps instead, I shall just practice her dance moves and jam out in my new prius with a seven year old. It's kid-approved!

More from my trip that isn't music soon. I promise.  

In the meantime, check out more of Christine & The Queens here. 

You had best believe that you cannot build what I don't need

Rare thunderstorms in LA are ushering me to Britain today. 

My itinerary-- a year in the making-- has me feeling a bit shot out of a cannon, but is entirely my own doing. I haven't been back to Scotland since the day I got on the bus in that last wind down to the end. I had that taste of London on the way back from Africa, and I'll admit I still associate the place with the only thing in my life I've ever felt like I failed at. I cried on the circle in. I have felt and still feel a rough letting go of that place and the life I saw for myself there. 

It becomes more complicated the more entrenched I get in my LA life; the more I love it. 

As I cross over anniversaries and milestones, unremarked upon, the more I am having to redefine myself against the hardline definitions I had of myself earlier in my life. I can say to myself now--- you've been away from New  York as long as you were ever there. Why do you still consider yourself a New Yorker? You don't really miss it, you only miss Europe. But LA... 

I still feel torn about my intent. My intent to live as one or many of the incarnations of myself. 

I'm scared of falling out of my life here by being gone so long. I'm scared of missing an opportunity that I've painstakingly built a foundation for here. 

I'm scared it's still not enough time to be in any of the places I'm going to settle into the rhythm. Scared it's not enough time to catch back that magic of my life there. I'm scared that the way I was there will be at odds with the way I am now and I won't be able to reconcile them. I'm scared my practice will fall off and I won't chant because of time, and mindset, and my friends' hard disbelief in Buddhism. 

But CHVRCHES has got my back. Giving us all a new song to sing me to Scotland. And a new album this September 25 -- Every Open Eye. 

And I'm going to give it my best go to report to whatever readers are left here. I can't guarantee I'll be able to. I can't guarantee I'll have anything or anything worthwhile to say. But if I do, I'll be here. Hope to see you.

Onward. To the East and to the North. To London, Edinburgh, Bamff, Skye, Uist, Geneva, Provence, Lugano and everywhere in between, to Dublin, to Clare and back again. 

Monkey Sanctuary - Excerpt

Why hello. Nice to see you again. Nice to have something I wanted to put here. There is much to tell, actually, but now isn't the right time. Right now, I am thinking about the one year anniversary of my very interesting sojourn to Ghana. A year ago right now, I was just settling into my second full day. None of what I'm about to tell you had happened yet.

I've been working on this "short" story for a year. Even in the Accra airport, I began to write this down in notebooks, along with the almost overwhelming amount of emotional and physical information I had taken in over the two weeks.

I can't share everything with you here. But I did want to give you a little taste.

Just for context, here's the blurb:

Somewhere between rekindling a trans-atlantic romance and calling it quits for good, a couple tries a new locale on holiday in Ghana’s Cape Coast. At an isolated nature reserve, an eccentric Dutch couple reveals more than anyone bargained for about our biological evolution when we choose to stay together.

And here is the text! A nice non-emotional, yet meatier middle chunk of 

MONKEY SANCTUARY.

Forty-five minutes later, they were still in the car on the way to the monkey reserve that was “right up the road.”

Casey had underestimated how big Ghana was. Almost everything they said was "close" ended up being an hour drive at least. Maybe it was all the extra police stops you had to make. Every few miles, the police in navy and light blue camo (She couldn’t quite see the point in that particular camo) would pull over every car and inspect. Gordon would warn her each time to hide any electronics. (“They’ll take it. They’ll find a reason to take it.”)

Or maybe everything took so long because-- with the exception of the George W. Bush Expressway, ironically enough, both “The Best Road in All of Africa,” but also simply the best road in all of Africa--  the roads were all so bad.

In LA, the roads always failed at the edges. In Ghana, every road seemed to have huge, craggy chunks pulled up in the middle that had to be sharply swerved around—a kind of alien asphalt phlegm that Ghana kept trying to cough up. The center literally would not hold.