Acrylic & Glitter On Stretched Canvas, 2018

Night Choir

Night choir,

Songstresses of the dark,

Serenade with your warm melodies.

Soothing screech,

Piercing hum,

Smooth vibrato,

Harmonize with the lights—

Twinkle, fade.

💡 front porch light on!

You shall receive arts & media recs from a wee little painter 👩‍🎨

Fix (warning: substances, abuse, enslavement, self harm, suicidal ideation)

Pile up my substances

I want control

Obey my captors

The same old, same old

Countless masters I serve

Superficial reality

Rinse and repeat

Lies I tell myself to fall asleep

Cut up my willpower

And sell it to a fallacy

I want my life back

Tell me it’s not too late

Don’t want to say goodbye

Sick of paying for mistakes

trick or treat!

“Centennial Means 500 Years of Genocide!” by Ricardo Favela (photo taken at Frist Art Museum 9-21-24)

Druid Heights: Northern California Legacy

Go north of San Francisco, through the woods of Marin, up the southern side of Mount Tam, and you may find what remains of Druid Heights. This is the name of the bohemian community that settled there in 1954, led by poet Elsa Gidlow. Gidlow was best known for On a Grey Thread, thought to be the first book of openly lesbian love poetry published in North America. Initially envisioned as a secluded retreat, Druid Heights quickly attracted other trailblazers: Beats like Allen Ginsburg, queer radicals, women’s liberation activists who came to socialize or get away from socializing. For many, it was a place to party and listen to music: The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and the Eagles all played there. A few made it their home, like philosopher Alan Watts who moved there in 1971, had a library built, and died soon after. The countercultural figures who visited this fabled five acres remain in popular memory. The buildings they stayed in have had a more precarious history.

These were designed by Roger Somers, a carpenter-turned-architect who with his white beard and maharishi clothing looked somewhat like a druid himself. A Somers house is wooden and seemingly inspired by Indonesian batak houses, Japanese stone gardens, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian fancies, and The Hobbit. They made perfect sense, but probably only if you were on any number of drugs at any number of parties that made the retreat infamous.

The party lasted long after Druid Heights’ heyday—lasted probably until 2001, when Somers died in his hot tub on site. It was definitely over by 2006 after the National Parks Service, which had used eminent domain to seize the land in 1977, evicted all residents who did not have permanent leases. Since then, the forest has slowly reclaimed its territory, and only the occupied buildings are in sound condition.

The Parks Service has shown little interest in maintaining what is left. In 2017, a campaign was launched to save the Heights, to little effect; and the few remaining residents are in their 80s. Is this a fitting end? Watts once wrote: "What makes this world a beautiful experience is the impermanence and mutability of all things.“ Druid Heights was based on spontaneity, anarchism, improvisation—a preservation society is the opposite of this. In a culture of constant growth and productivity, one in which we expect all things to remain available at all times, to let the Heights decay into the past is perhaps the most countercultural action to take. But the Heights also represents an authenticity rare in a radically changed Bay Area that has allowed its cultural heritage to vanish or corporatize; perhaps then the most subversive act is to save it, and to save it for the same reasons we want to save the redwoods that surround it: because it is unique, because it is there, because places like it can’t grow just anywhere and might never come again.

Elsa Gidlow in her shoji room.

Gidlow and Watts in the gardens of Druid Heights.

Gidlow in her bedroom surrounded by her books.

GAD

Makko-powdered ether—

Floral-membraned leather

Etherizes my heather.

Brain filling up with lies,

Sidereal eyes

Highlight my cracked smile.

Undermine my sanity,

Earthquake my gaze;

Plagiarize the quality

My cerebrum behaves.

Lover

Melt your fingertips into my skin,

Honey dripping between limbs.

Ebony hands gripping porcelain hips,

Obsidian and howlite,

Evening and starlight,

Melt me with your tender kiss.

Oh, lover,

Sweet embrace among silken cloth,

Hovering like a moth

To your flame, under our covers.

Hallway (warning: horror, death, blood, gore, violence)

The PA system boomed

“They’ve made it into the school.

Lock and barricade your current room.”

I was in the hallway.

A stampede of bodies arose,

Living turning to dead to decompose.

Frightened and running through pools,

Slipping on blood in the hallway.

Beings crammed behind doors,

Quasi train cars as hopeful shields from doom.

Fearful faces cowered from windows,

Hiding from monsters in the hallway.

The growls approached.

The claws made their presence known.

Limbs and organs covered the floor.

The monsters were hungry for more than those in the hallway.