What if you could grow hearts in the ground, or even in pots for the city-dweller. What if you could grow hearts and they came from seeds the shape of shoes and you had to water them and they hung from a vine like paper birds, all sunken and unfolded. What if when the hearts were ripe, you could pick as many or as few as you wanted and the moment they were plucked from the vine they turned into little fires but they didn’t burn in your hand. What if they burned but you couldn’t feel any heat and what if when they died, they turned blue and drained like squid ink but didn’t stain your hands. What if when you buried them back in the ground nothing could grow in that soil ever again. What if you couldn’t step on the ground where a heart had been buried because you would sink. What if walking became heart-hopscotch and we called it dancing. What if one day we all could only stand in one place because the earth had become barren because hearts were buried everywhere except where each of us was standing in our shoe-shaped feet. What if people first tried to flap their arms and fly. What if people rigged intricate rope systems to try to swing across the hallowed ground to get to one another. Who would take the first step toward someone else even though they knew they would sink. That person would be the first one of us to comprehend everything.

MP3: The Dharohar Project, Mumford & Sons and Laura Marling- Meheni Rachi

posted by holly.

I take it down, and I put it back up. This video is about falling and rising again.

posted by holly

Sigur Ros comes out with a new album in May.

A little white brick chapel is in the center and bridges the crease. Little flat people spill out of it. Down the street, a pharmacy has opened. There is a hill with five flowers that grow in a patch. A couple is strolling through it. The flowers are two-dimensional, but the couple blooms. He has something in his pocket. Her arm fits in the crook of his elbow. His pocket is a cardboard envelope. Gently, you can pull it open and find a paper watch. It is exactly noon.

What is missing is power lines, clouds, words. A boy chasing a bunny is bent forward with his arms outreached, but even in still life, the rabbit escapes him. Ahead, there is a black circle in the grass three hops away.

All the homes are flat except their chimneys. All the people are flat except the couple on their walk, him with a pocket watch, both of them with papercut elbows; they only have fronts. Their backs are blank if you look down inside them. The chapel is empty inside it, just space and white paper. It is exactly noon, a vertical hour. On a pop-up bench, pop up men play a game of chess with flat pawns and horses and queens. Everyone has just made the right move, and you won’t see their next one, which is to collapse there before they rise somewhere else.

MP3: Gym, Deer- Much A Goodness

Buy the album, other, ways. It’s an adventure: http://cdn.topspin.net/api/v2/store/details/94202

posted by holly.

P.S. We still are accepting entries for our contest: http://www.seamstressfortheband.org/?p=3051

The second worst cop-out a writer can pull is revealing on the last pages that the whole story was the narrator’s dream. The thing even worse is when the writer makes you wonder if it was a dream or it really happened, implying that reality is a thing we are meant to question, like we need saving not from the fall, but from our grasp. It’s a smug philosophy, art’s forged signature whose cursive loops suggest there is no truth, or fiction for that matter.

A few nights ago, while my friends played pool, I sat at a tall table of strangers. They were large men, except one who was a slim, tucked-in button down mustachioed man whose irises were goldfish blinking underwater. He pulled down his collar and showed me the scars from the surgery that saved him from cancer. He lit a cigarette and told me that as far as he could tell, my soul was headed for hell. Please, please, get saved, he begged. “You don’t want to wait until you’re in death’s grip.” His hand wrapped around his throat, over his scars.

I wasn’t insulted. He believes what he believes as strongly as I believe what I do. You don’t talk someone out of his faith. They’re having a good dream. And the faithful are only trying to wake those of us who appear to be sleepwalking. We can’t have a dialogue across that border of consciousness. We disagree on which one of us is awake and who is under the spell of illusion.

While I don’t think my soul needs saving, I attempt to save everything else. Just now I closed an old draft of an essay. It was difficult to click my cursor on “don’t save.” An hour ago, I took my video camera to the convenience store in case anything happened that I wanted to keep. I’ve saved three inchworms this week. This is why I write, photograph, record everything. I don’t believe much in my own soul, but when I saw a sign taped to the window at a local store that read: If you break, I’m sorry. You will have to pay for it, I had to capture it on camera and rescue it from being an awkwardly worded waiver so that it could have eternal life as a found poem.

When the man at the bar tried to save my soul, I wanted to lie for him. I wanted to say, you know what, Brian? I will accept your way. He needed to save me in order to preserve himself. Would I have been sacrificing my own integrity to feign faith? Does the inchworm need saving from the collar of my boyfriend’s shirt? Am I trying to save my boyfriend from the inchworm? Aren’t we all harmless and blindly inching toward salvation, what Anne Sexton called, “the awful rowing toward God,” even those of us who insist, merrily, with our academia and our absolutes, merrily with our vodka toasts and our winter coats, merrily on accrued vacation time, merrily staring like dumb toads at museums of dinosaur bone Gods, making merry periodic table sense that everything in the universe is tiny and trembling at varying rates of speed, that all we may see or seem, is a Rumi shroud, a passing cirrus cloud, and life is but a dream.

MP3: Beach House- Myth

Beach House’s new album, Bloom, will be released May 15, 2012:

posted by holly

“The only truth is music.”

I run into Jack everywhere, mostly when I want to run away, which is always, except when I want everything to stay the way it is, which is also always—also the reason why I plan to run away.

For me, it’s a standing offer, a back up in a pick up loaded with pots of lavender to stick in the dry sod or mud or where ever lavender grows. I imagine he’d tell me to go. Who needs a car when you’ve got a thumb or a bar full of dim moons orbiting gins, stirring lies with the good aim of wet lips. I imagine he’d say, but why go? Why not exercise your right to stay in this seat and meet yourself over and over again by telling every stranger a different story, pouring in a little less truth every time until you’ve packed up every easel and folded it flat and that’s your life, a stack not of what you’ve painted, but the tunnel made from the places you crawled out.

I imagine he’d laugh at my pastel dream, call it a bullshit dharma, setting a doormat at the stoop of nirvana, asking for a wheel but choosing hubcap. So, today, Jack, on your ninetieth birthday, I’m going to sit in your lap with a beer next to a stranger, my white and dying cat who has leaned his skeleton next to my body, and tell him about the time he was a full moon.

MP3: Jack Kerouac- Moon (read by John Cale)

Buy Kicks Joy Darkness:  the poems of Jack Kerouac read by Patti Smith, Hunter S. Thompson, Michael Stipe, Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and on and on

posted by holly. “In some cases the moon is you. In any case, the moon.”

And now for something completely different. We are having a contest! We want YOU to write a Seamstress piece. You pick the song, any song. You write words, any words.

The winner will receive a brand new iPod Shuffle in the color of his or her choosing, within the limits of what Apple offers, of course: silver, blue, green, orange, or pink. First this brand new iPod in your very own color will travel to Atlanta, Georgia, where we will fill it with music handpicked by us. Then we will cast a spell upon it, after which it will become a bat signal, of sorts. When it slides in your pocket, clips on your lapel, and begins spitting out notes so sweet and fine, no one in your field of vision will be able to escape your exquisite eye, your instant allure, and somewhere, someplace, two seamstresses will blink, grin, run their fingers through their hair and say you, yes, you, you foxy thing, are one of us.

RULES: We tend to think rules are for the unimaginative. That said, people who wear baseball caps backwards or socks with sandals give us cause to rethink that some rules may be a good thing. Try to keep it under 1000 words. That said, there are single sentences that deserve Pulitzers. Your work can be in any form: poem, short story, true fiction, a reality you’ve hallucinated. It just must be original and previously unpublished. Contest is limited to native residents of Earth only. The winner will be chosen when at least 99 entries have been received, so please spread the word. Generating competition will help you win sooner. The winner’s entry will receive the magic iPod, and be published on our website with author credit along with his or her accompanying mp3. You may submit an original photo (of anything) along with it, or we can choose one for you.  The first runner-up will also have his or her piece published on the website. All rights to your work remain yours. We don’t own you. We just want to borrow you for a day.

Submit entries with the text in the body of the email to mp3@seamstressfortheband.org. You may attach the mp3 or include the name of the song and the artist and we will hunt it down ourselves. Please include your full name, the city or town in which you live and your state or country.

Don’t be shy. You look smashing today, and we know you’re brilliant.

I have a guitar, keep trying to write a song, but I can’t play guitar. I can’t sing. This guitar doesn’t deserve me. I don’t even know if it is in tune. The lights on my tuner have faded. It springs on E and goes dead. So, I’ve used my ear, and everything sounds minor.

The pick I found is the one we got at Graceland. Elvis’s gold silhouette tips a mic stand, but it looks like a pitchfork, or a broom and he’s trying to sweep something away.

Beers are on the table, still bound in some environmentally friendly and minimalist packaging. They are a quartet and plastic-bound audience. The two empty ones are inching toward the exit.

I listen to Bob Dylan, thinking if I can just come up with one line, like “you’re going to make me lonesome when you go,” the rest will come easy: the minutiae of morning tea, your morning hair, the horizontal and vertical, black and white of New York Times crosswords, your leaning over and laughing at my creative answers, the lift of your eyeglasses when you shift perspective. I could rhyme things like Mississippi River with moon sliver, or Paris, which I could rhyme with Ferris, if I could leave out that it was a wheel. Bastille could work with wheel, but that was another day, and I can only tell the truth. That day, it rained, and we woke to war planes. I could rhyme that, in the right tense. I cannot rhyme much with Reykjavik or Posip, the bora—that Croatian wind—but I could rhyme, somehow, treading water: the Adriatic Sea churning against the rocks, pulling me back and toward you while you waited with your arms outstretched. Waves. Saves? I could rhyme lots with wine: fine, dine, pine, line, mine. Seine, if I didn’t know better, on a bridge where my ice cream fell off the cone. You’re gonna make me lonesome when you’re gone? Still, not quite.

I’ve retired this guitar. The capo clutches on to the second fret on the chair beside me. The rest of the chairs are empty except mine, where I tried to write a song, but I just didn’t have a good line. I only have details. Just notes. Just Do Re Me. Those basic things that make a song, but I can’t scream or wail like this. I have it in me, but it stops at my lips—no, behind my lips—only my esophagus knows what I feel, but it can’t make these sounds. Only what is behind my throat sings what I feel, pushed by the organs behind that, and by the bleeding thing that hides behind that, and so on until it is my ghost, who can not do much more than make a staircase creak.

MP3: Joni Mitchell- A Case of You

posted by holly. This is the best song ever written.

I remember, I think some time ago, yes, when love was an easy walk. I recall along the way, daffodils, jonquils, arguing gently about those words. Are they the same? Are they weeds? How do they grow, and when they do, is it too easily, too frequent and too everywhere. Green.

They grow in your yard too early. Another frost is coming. This climate has tricked them into blooming. Yellow.

Last night we argued for the first time after two years of peace, if peace were a verb and not a default. I’m not Canada. You are no Switzerland. Daffodils, Jonquils. We were naked, in a bath with a lamp that makes seasons last seconds. The light changes—this is why I bought it, your Valentine—the colors alter with such subtlety that red makes blue in semantics only. Daffodils, Jonquils. Purple.

Purple is our favorite color only because we cannot choose one, which is the problem. By choosing one, you must forego another. It’s an understood adultery. Red. Blue.

Our story goes something like this song. Today, I looked out your window. Gray.

“Don’t. Too bright,” I said through a headache. “I miss you already,” I said when you opened the shades. This was brave. But the real bravery, I thought, while I looked into the clouds and your yard and the metal sculpture daffodils stuck in your grass, is that someone dug a hole to put them in. They stay, exaggerated and tall, as if Alice herself sniffed them and drunkenly fell down, chasing some rabbit. White.

The real bravery is falling, no, tumbling, without guard. With my eyes on that gray window, I thought about my own guard, that the real pain is in having a guard, in bracing for the crash. It is sitting in a car before it runs and pulling the seat beat over your body. It is that subconscious wisdom: buckle up. You could be thrown. But, the crash will be painless. It is the air that hurts. This color isn’t in the arch of the rainbow. It is after you’ve passed so many of them, and not seen enough of them. The same mixed thing, too many coats of paint, too many notes in a chord, too many firing synapses and too many flying heartbeats. Time is measurable in shades, shadows, ghosts, irrevocable clouds, and drama curtains. Neutrality is the best you can do. Someone who understands she must be nude, but who picks through her closet to find a dress in a color you’ve not yet seen.

MP3: Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova- Falling Slowly

posted by holly.

This song is everything I gave up and burned in a kiln. This song melted the ceramic vase I sculpted back into a clay puddle. This song is the dripping wet of my beige fingers. It is the liquid I gave away and said, “make me solid again.”

This song weighs what I weigh, the same as a lily pad weighs on water. This song is the splash of me missing the lily pad, a terrible ballerina in a frog tutu. You, though, are a bird, perched sparrow on a thin branch fleeing from winter, the same branch on which you landed last winter, and the one before, and the one before that, toward a song. This is your song. Again. You migrate just as you’ve been instructed by your bone-knowing, the only thing you know, primitive and instinct. Your footprints are tridents. Your eyes are black beads shifting, abacus-counting the miles before you land again where you’ve landed before.

In this song, I sink, dumbfounded, in unbreathable water somewhere deep and cold where I take mermaid advice. I grow my hair from head to waist, and dye it seaweed color, and have no sense of direction. No north, no south, no winter. My hands age. The rest of me stays the same. My fingers reach past my skin. My skin is clay. My bones are a compass without a magnetic field. They stretch in every direction unable to quite reach science or to adequately fold in prayer, and so they lock together, like evolution, an amphibian myth: air’s swallowed desire, water’s gasping wish.

MP3: Damien Rice- Cold Water

Drown in this beautiful album about water and air:

posted by holly.

In North East China, a fossilized microscopic wing has been discovered. It belonged to a katydid who lived 165 million years ago. Scientists have been able to reconstruct her song from this wing, which also functioned as her instrument. It is the first known song to have existed on earth.

We humans tend to think we invented music, that it gives us purpose, that we gave it breath, but music has been used always—if we define always as 165 million years ago—as the only language we have to call out to anyone nearby to come find us. We are somewhere high in a tree. We are camouflage, in cahoots with the leaves. We don’t want to be seen, only heard.

MP3: Arms- Eyeball

Buy the album, Kids Aflame:  

posted by holly.