In Which We Configure Perfectly The Life We Love

by joan brown

Emulation

by NATALIE ELLIOTT

The second time was at Christmas. My best friend took me over to her boyfriend’s mom’s two-bedroom house with the intention of introducing me to the older brother, who was in town from New York. “He has a pompadour and this big face,” was her only description. When we got there the mother was in bed and the brother was sleeping on the sofa in the uncomfortably small sitting room. We startled him awake and promptly installed ourselves on the adjacent loveseat, speaking gently and staring at him inquisitively, hands folded in laps, like caseworkers. His voice rumbled with a shower of gravel in a wheelbarrow. He put on some music. I asked him, after an awkwardly small amount of conversation, if I could touch his hand. I asked because it dangled over the back of his chair like an accessory, and it looked coarse and weathered. I knew he’d been working as a commercial fisherman off the Alaskan coast. I needed to fact-check.

Maybe you have never suffered from this fetish. Maybe you didn’t spend lonely Friday nights in high school charting every tic of Travis Bickle’s waxen face over the entire 113 minutes and crying at the part when he takes Betsy to the dirty movie. Some women are sick people. As children, they take the Beats too seriously, and then they go off to college and lament all of the squirrelly young fellows around them who manage to seduce with unsteady intellect and little else. Like how Jake Barnes describes Robert Cohn as someone who did something because he read about it in a book once. These women seek the antidote to that; the man who is the book, not just the reader. We dabble unconsciously in Marxist literary criticism and fake-suffer from the fact that there are no Men around. “Where are the Men?” we ask, like a team of Marlon Brandos will just materialize on the far side of the quad, all leather-daddied out and everything.

by joan brown

So this fisherman person was a revelation. He never went to college; it was a fight we would later have a dozen times. He wooed me with inimitable stories about stealing chickens from Hasidim, gutting fifty pounds of octopus, getting picked up by a transvestite so he would have a place to sleep indoors for the night. I gave him an AK Press copy of You Can’t Win, and he patly told me he used to volunteer at AK Press. We disagreed about Charles Bukowski, and he spent an entire day scouring every bookstore in town until he found a copy of Ham on Rye, which he wrapped nicely and presented to me at work. I read it on Christmas Day. It was a perfect burst of romance for whatever it was. I wish we hadn’t ruined it.

Our relationship was confusing. He left to fish the crab derby and I’d hear from him once a week, in strange Alaska time, which was usually at the end of my college night. The more weeks passed, the more he seemed like an apparition. The more I began to subtly imitate his coolly slurred diction, his impenetrable slang. The more I flirted with women in the way that I imagined he would. I didn’t want to love him as much as I wanted to be like him. It was a lame and quiet fury. The fury of a sad person.

If you’re from Alabama but you’re not presently there, everyone will call you Bama. As the girlfriend, I was forbidden from using this moniker. I was hardly able to say it with a straight face anyway, seeing as how we were sleeping a block away from the University of Alabama campus. If I drank too much and it slipped out, he would scowl like I’d called him some nasty epithet. Sometimes when I came home from class he would be drunk already. He was almost his sweetest then, like a proud father watching his daughter succeed. As the night progressed, though, this appreciation would curdle into resentment, and I’d get an earful of what exactly I didn’t learn about the world from behind my ivy walls. The thing is, though, I loved being talked to like that. He was right. I didn’t know. And because I loved it, I would explode with defensiveness. 

by joan brown

He got his entire throat tattooed while he stayed with me. He stalked around the apartment with the residual ink-and-pus mixture oozing onto the neckline of his wifebeater. He laughed in slow motion. One night in May, we threw an impromptu pool party at a shitty apartment complex where only one of our friends lived, and he swam in a pair of my bikini bottoms. He filched wooden pallets from behind the Publix next door and built a fire in the cookout pit. It was like California all of a sudden. Everything he did extemporaneously came off without a hitch. He was desperate with charm. I would beam at him from short distances, watching him operate completely without anxiety. I was so envious of this human.

Our fights got worse. One of his last nights in town, I didn’t eat enough food, and drank for most of the evening. We ended up wrestling on my bed. He pinned me down by my shoulders and I headbutted him in ludicrous self-defense. The blood from his nose dripped over my face and neck and onto my pillow. When  I sat up, I moved to strike him again and he clocked me in my right eye. I saw stars like a cartoon character. I slumped against the wall, knowing I’d been defeated. A few days later, when he was out, I called my ex-boyfriend, with whom I’d also fought like this, to tell him what had happened. I still don’t know why I told him, but I was almost certainly boasting. Like a tough guy.

I experienced a four-day hangover the week he left. I thought I’d been poisoned, or given some kind of disease. It was obvious things were bad and may not continue. He was silent for two weeks, and when he decided to call me again, I was already seeing someone else. He remained furious until a few months later when he called to clear the air and tell me he was also in love with someone else. A local Alaskan girl. We were glad for each other.

The thing is, it’s unfair to fetishize someone else’s life, even if they portray their life to you as some kind of glamorous fiction. Even being the antidote to the college boy doesn’t completely free you from the conscriptions of your imagination. He loved Moby Dick and he became a fisherman. Growing up he felt he was the ugly outcast. When he discovered Henry Chianski, his feelings made sense and he began to adorn his body with disfiguring tattoos in lieu of acne vulgaris. I also process fiction like this; many of us do. We all have small ways of emulating the lives of unreal people we hoped we’d become. The line of truth between him and me was that I was a woman, a pretty Southern woman, wholly uncomfortable in my skin. What I felt like in my soul was the heedless wanderer, the working-class hero, the undereducated alpha. I was imprisoned by my culture, by my body. He was my most realized attempt to escape, and it didn’t work. 

We grew up, and our memories of the people we were together became more foreign to us. He traveled the world, settled in San Francisco, then L.A., became a fashion maven, a filmmaker. I lingered in the South, pitifully literary and resisting as many cultural traditions as I could: a permanent, pointless rebel in a land where rebellion was a regional myth, not a pastime.

We remained in touch, emailing every now and then over the years, saying nothing in particular. I married a lithe Texas hippie and moved to Northern Italy. I grew more miserable. Married life hurt me and Italian culture stifled me even more than I was used to. I was in the most meaningful relationship I’d ever known and was totally at odds with the concept of losing the fiction of myself for this greater cause. I drank in my resistance, and in my drinking, revealed I was no different at all from the angry little person I was eight years ago, clawing and snapping, physically struggling against the person who says they know better than me, and is saying so because they love me.

The blistering morning this spring I conceded and decided to get sober, I came across a piece of crushing news. This Bama, my sailor of yore, had thrown himself headfirst into the bay beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. He broke his neck, his back, and shattered both his femurs, but survived. Just as I always believed, he is a miracle. How we managed to twin our suffering for so long, I have no idea. True, I have never quite reached the dark heart of despair that he has, but crashing into cold tiled floors, screaming at the sunset from the top of a medieval wall, tearing at my chest, I feel I have come close. And how strange that we surfaced almost at the same time? Immediately I sent him a note of condolence and he wrote back, gushing with wisdom and positivity: “Realize you are perfect right now. Everything is okay and everything can change in an instant to the life you always wanted. No matter what. When you are happy and hopeful your husband will be happy and hopeful.” I have a postcard he made in the hospital, a watercolor of a green face with a giant blue and pink eye, in the style of a Toltec carving, inscribed with a quote on the back from one of his friends there, “Maybe life’s not as hard as you thought it was.” I am already, almost instantly better. I just hope that he is also now free.

Natalie Elliott is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find her twitter here.

Paintings by Joan Brown.

"Black Moss" - Johanna Warren (mp3)

by joan brown

In Which We Hope The Contessa Does Not Hear

photo by Nicholas Pippins

Scenes From A New Marriage

by NATALIE ELLIOTT

Two months after your wedding, you move to Bergamo. It was part of the plan all along — your husband is becoming a Montessori teacher, and over the next ten months, will be taking what is largely considered the most demanding course for certification. At the orientation reception, at the behest of the directress, the spouses in attendance stand up and introduce themselves. A bulky Finnish man in a blazer pledges his intention to take care of his two daughters while his wife studies, and everyone coos in warm appreciation. The last in line, you demure, unnoticed. A moment later, the directress, who is a ferocious, dazzling British lady, wants to know why you didn’t, asking in front of everyone. Flushing, you gasp for a word. “Because I chickened out,” is all you can manage, eyes downcast.

Your wedding was a triumph but your marriage is not. A hasty, family-only ceremony that was planned and perfectly executed within two weeks. You both trembled before the other, languid sweat-droplets mingling with tears in the Texas heat, reading vows penned in the most humiliating privacy. Your parents, who had never met, got along graciously. Over champagne and tequila shots, everyone in attendance said it was the most moving ceremony they had ever witnessed.

Part of the understanding is that you would play housewife. “This course is so challenging,” all of your husband’s mentors say, “you really just need to be there for support.”  You nod, grinning blandly, groping for a misplaced wineglass. “Well, he did that for me, when I was at the magazine,” you assure them. They raise an eyebrow, “But this will be different.”

Neither of you speak Italian. You feel primed for the adventure, but when you arrive, everything is much harder than imagined. Internet service is bafflingly elusive. It’s a small town, so there are no Anglophones. The school arranges for you to look at some apartments. You want the first one, but your husband takes the second one. Your landlord, who lives across the hall, shares the last name of the building. His aunt, a contessa, shares one wall of your flat. It’s the kitchen wall that has a door in it with a taped-over peephole. This is where you do all of your fighting.

You’re a writer, so you’re prepared for the solitude. A friend suggests you make a reading list, maybe of classics that you’ve never gotten to — like someone might do for grad-school comps. You scrawl in your planner a new “assignment” on the Monday of each week. You sketch ideas for essays. Your favorite editor has left the magazine where you worked, so you write to him in brief, plaintive e-mails containing several exclamation points. He writes back amicably with advice, even though he doesn’t have to anymore.

photo by Nicholas Pippins

Every day you wake up too late. Your anxious sleeping issues return. Your husband buys you melatonin, lets you get out of bed at four a.m. to check your -email in the pitch-black kitchen. Your eyeballs stick in their sockets. Your husband leaves the house at quarter to eight, and you sleep until nine-thirty, ten-thirty, sometimes eleven. The bells from the church across the street gong you awake. They are echoed by another church around the corner.

At first, you would wake up and read, but now you rise so late you immediately have to make the bed. If it’s close to eleven, you have to start lunch, because your husband will be home anywhere between twelve-fifteen and twelve-thirty to eat. Usually he has to go back to school by one or one-thirty. You shuffle around in pajamas, slurping the rest of his cold coffee. Sometimes you can connect to the internet and check your e-mail. You begin cooking.

You get a job nannying for your husband’s classmate, a single mother from New Zealand. Her daughter is five, named for a Raymond Chandler character, and dresses like a typical cool Montessori child — wearing no less than nine articles of clothing at once, polka dots and plaid dresses and garlands of flowers in her hair. Work is always good for you, since you were raised culturally Protestant — the kind that wants money and to live a life of suffering that can only be alleviated by passionate toil.

The job forces you to get dressed and leave the house. The chief difference between Italian women and American women is that Italian women dress flatteringly before they go out in public. Even their sweatpants are astonishingly tailored and sported with a kind of casual aplomb. You like this, but even in Bergamo you lose the desire to dress before running to the supermarket. At your lowest point, you wear leggings and a sack dress with a blazer thrown over. You hide your sleep-damp hair under a knitted cap. Your socks don’t match. You feel feverish, pouring with sweat on a chilly morning.

The child likes to stop in churches and examine their iconography. Though areligious, she learned about Catholicism here in school. She points out Jesus and Jesus’s mother, even though she’s almost always wrong. Usually you’re looking at Saint John or Saint Peter. She asks for a coin to light a candle. You have to explain to her how a candle is like a prayer for someone you love or who needs help. She assures you that Mary isn’t real and can’t help people. “Yes,” you whisper, “but it’s a comforting thing, and that’s why people do it, to feel better and express love.” She looks at you slyly.

Of course, you buy a rosary on holiday in Bellagio. It’s wooden, so your husband can take turns wearing it. There’s a small picture of the deformed Saint Leopold in the middle. At the end, there’s a wooden cross adorned with one of those violently gaunt silver bodies of Christ. Sometimes when you bend over it slips out of your blouse and the child points and cries, “It’s Lowd Jeesas!” Next time you go into San Bernardino, you light a candle for your mind. Your thin zealotry is so obvious; you don’t even understand what you’re doing. You wonder if you’re channeling Emma Bovary recovering from Rodolphe.

Each night over dinner, you discuss with your husband plans for the next day’s meals. You try to have some kind of meat for him at least once a day. You lose the desire to visit the supermarket with such frequency and start making lentil soups and things he didn’t ask for, but will eat obligingly anyway. Unlike other women, cooking for your beloved doesn’t comfort you, it just gives you a mindless task to keep you from feeling sorry for yourself, a thing to organize your time.

photo by Nicholas Pippins

Sometimes he calls you “Wyf,” like in Chaucerian Middle English. He means it innocently, of course. In fact, you probably gave him the idea for the nickname. Still, the more he says it, the more you feel pushed into the glib and careless form, an archetype on mottled paper, squirming between two lines of text. Less and less a thing of flesh that he admires.

Your street is at least medieval, though the landlord claims it was built by Romans. It lurches upward toward the wall of the old city, a vast partition that was erected by the Venetians in anticipation of an attack from the Milan Grand Duchy that never happened. In these parts, the roads are dangerously narrow, and paved with broken bricks laid out like chevrons. Except for the call-boxes and stray sprinklings of neon, your neighborhood looks relatively unchanged since 1910. When you step out at night, the undulating paths and hidden corners make it feel oppressively cold, Dickensian. You almost immediately get sleepy and disoriented. The opposite of Stendhal syndrome, there should be a name for this condition.

You delight in your husband’s exuberance about his studies. You’ve never known him in a moment when he loved the thing he was doing so much. He leads the reading discussion groups. He excels; he stays late to chat with the directress. A classmate jokes that they’re plotting to run away together. You’re not jealous of his experience; you’re proud. The animal of your jealousy burrows much deeper than that.

Attempts to lick your wounds often land you at the late-night bar (as opposed to day-time, coffee-serving bar) one street over. You pass by a lit storefront where college-age activists sit in meetings planning a zine. The bar is called the Caffé degli Artisti, with signage in Papyrus font, and the clientele all seem to take the name too seriously. You have variously encountered a Kosovar photographer who used the word “nigger” affectionately and a leather-jacketed Romanian with a topknot who philosophized about the artificial manufacture of the human soul in the context of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. You loudly upbraid the Kosovar in accent-less, musical English, a strange dialect you developed years ago, solely to communicate poetically with non-native speakers.

photo by Nicolas Pippins

Old patterns resurface. You come home from this bar after drinking too much cheap scotch, and hotly, like a smarted child, accuse your husband of wanting a divorce. He grabs you by your shoulders to calm you, but you end up writhing in a sobbing and wretched ball on the kitchen floor. You turn on the fan in the hood over the stove in hopes that the contessa can’t hear your spluttering. The next morning, you sit in the gray silence while your husband sleeps it off, drinking coffee alone and paralyzed at the sound of any overheard conversation in Italian. You realize you need a hobby besides reading D.H. Lawrence and making lunch.

Your vocabulary expands to about fifty words, maybe five sentences. You don’t really like Italian. It’s all of the hard parts of Latin without the familiar cadence of Spanish. And you’re too willfully Protestant to appreciate Italian culture. You give yourself pedicures in the bidet. You despise the tawdry, oversweet pastries and tire of gelato. You save all of your vegetable scraps, onion skins, pancetta fat, and cheese rinds and boil them down for greasy broth. This makes you feel equal parts the noble pauper and the resourceful wife. You’d give anything to eat food made spicy with something other than black pepper, to drink dark beer, to return to your diet, not mainly comprised of wheat and sugar and dairy.

It’s frustrating, as a writer, to have no language. It’s tremendous, as a wife, to have a distracted husband. You oscillate between quietly resenting him and wanting him too much. You weep at missing him; your plodding attempts at inspiring affection are often met with his swift recoil. Nobody wants anyone that desperate, and you know better. You can’t seem to escape the torments you’ve established for yourself. The next movie you watch is The Earrings of Madame de..., you notice she leaves those precious baubles in the church at the end. Sometimes you stare too hard at certain men, examining them, wondering if you should also have an affair. But it’s impossible, even out of boredom. Loving someone to bits is basically terrifying for that person, and that’s what you always do.

Your husband finally decides you can’t hide in your reading and movie-watching anymore. After all, he was around for the week last spring you plowed through three volumes of Richard Yates. You were so despondent — thank god you weren’t married then; you probably wouldn’t have survived. On weekends, your husband sits on the foot of the bed while you read, like a house cat. You stubbornly ignore him, even though he thinks he’s withering inside. You two are constantly battling for the other’s attention. It’s never delivered at the right time.

This new marriage is somehow the greatest challenge to yourself you’ve ever accepted. It’s the arduous chemical breakdown of two blazing, demonstrative people who must dissolve, piece by piece, into the bigger entity that they have asked to become. You were never ready to be a housewife, even though the act of completely absorbing yourself with someone you love feels, in the abstract, like an attractive idea. The reality is as lonely as it has been in novels for two hundred years. But the thing itself, the institution, is a true and assenting agony you never expected, and you begin to understand that no authority you looked to as a guide has perhaps ever portrayed it accurately.

Natalie Elliott is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find her twitter here.

photo by Nicholas Pippins

"Why Do You Feel?" - Flight Facilities (mp3)

"Two Bodies" - Flight Facilities (mp3)

In Which It Was A Fight We Would Later Have A Dozen Times

by joan brown

Bama

by NATALIE ELLIOTT

The second time was at Christmas. My best friend took me over to her boyfriend’s mom’s two-bedroom house with the intention of introducing me to the older brother, who was in town from New York. “He has a pompadour and this big face,” was her only description. When we got there the mother was in bed and the brother was sleeping on the sofa in the uncomfortably small sitting room. We startled him awake and promptly installed ourselves on the adjacent loveseat, speaking gently and staring at him inquisitively, hands folded in laps, like caseworkers. His voice rumbled with a shower of gravel in a wheelbarrow. He put on some music. I asked him, after an awkwardly small amount of conversation, if I could touch his hand. I asked because it dangled over the back of his chair like an accessory, and it looked coarse and weathered. I knew he’d been working as a commercial fisherman off the Alaskan coast. I needed to fact-check.

Maybe you have never suffered from this fetish. Maybe you didn’t spend lonely Friday nights in high school charting every tic of Travis Bickle’s waxen face over the entire 113 minutes and crying at the part when he takes Betsy to the dirty movie. Some women are sick people. As children, they take the Beats too seriously, and then they go off to college and lament all of the squirrelly young fellows around them who manage to seduce with unsteady intellect and little else. Like how Jake Barnes describes Robert Cohn as someone who did something because he read about it in a book once. These women seek the antidote to that; the man who is the book, not just the reader. We dabble unconsciously in Marxist literary criticism and fake-suffer from the fact that there are no Men around. “Where are the Men?” we ask, like a team of Marlon Brandos will just materialize on the far side of the quad, all leather-daddied out and everything.

by joan brown

So this fisherman person was a revelation. He never went to college; it was a fight we would later have a dozen times. He wooed me with inimitable stories about stealing chickens from Hasidim, gutting fifty pounds of octopus, getting picked up by a transvestite so he would have a place to sleep indoors for the night. I gave him an AK Press copy of You Can’t Win, and he patly told me he used to volunteer at AK Press. We disagreed about Charles Bukowski, and he spent an entire day scouring every bookstore in town until he found a copy of Ham on Rye, which he wrapped nicely and presented to me at work. I read it on Christmas Day. It was a perfect burst of romance for whatever it was. I wish we hadn’t ruined it.

Our relationship was confusing. He left to fish the crab derby and I’d hear from him once a week, in strange Alaska time, which was usually at the end of my college night. The more weeks passed, the more he seemed like an apparition. The more I began to subtly imitate his coolly slurred diction, his impenetrable slang. The more I flirted with women in the way that I imagined he would. I didn’t want to love him as much as I wanted to be like him. It was a lame and quiet fury. The fury of a sad person.

If you’re from Alabama but you’re not presently there, everyone will call you Bama. As the girlfriend, I was forbidden from using this moniker. I was hardly able to say it with a straight face anyway, seeing as how we were sleeping a block away from the University of Alabama campus. If I drank too much and it slipped out, he would scowl like I’d called him some nasty epithet. Sometimes when I came home from class he would be drunk already. He was almost his sweetest then, like a proud father watching his daughter succeed. As the night progressed, though, this appreciation would curdle into resentment, and I’d get an earful of what exactly I didn’t learn about the world from behind my ivy walls. The thing is, though, I loved being talked to like that. He was right. I didn’t know. And because I loved it, I would explode with defensiveness. 

by joan brown

He got his entire throat tattooed while he stayed with me. He stalked around the apartment with the residual ink-and-pus mixture oozing onto the neckline of his wifebeater. He laughed in slow motion. One night in May, we threw an impromptu pool party at a shitty apartment complex where only one of our friends lived, and he swam in a pair of my bikini bottoms. He filched wooden pallets from behind the Publix next door and built a fire in the cookout pit. It was like California all of a sudden. Everything he did extemporaneously came off without a hitch. He was desperate with charm. I would beam at him from short distances, watching him operate completely without anxiety. I was so envious of this human.

Our fights got worse. One of his last nights in town, I didn’t eat enough food, and drank for most of the evening. We ended up wrestling on my bed. He pinned me down by my shoulders and I headbutted him in ludicrous self-defense. The blood from his nose dripped over my face and neck and onto my pillow. When  I sat up, I moved to strike him again and he clocked me in my right eye. I saw stars like a cartoon character. I slumped against the wall, knowing I’d been defeated. A few days later, when he was out, I called my ex-boyfriend, with whom I’d also fought like this, to tell him what had happened. I still don’t know why I told him, but I was almost certainly boasting. Like a tough guy.

I experienced a four-day hangover the week he left. I thought I’d been poisoned, or given some kind of disease. It was obvious things were bad and may not continue. He was silent for two weeks, and when he decided to call me again, I was already seeing someone else. He remained furious until a few months later when he called to clear the air and tell me he was also in love with someone else. A local Alaskan girl. We were glad for each other.

The thing is, it’s unfair to fetishize someone else’s life, even if they portray their life to you as some kind of glamorous fiction. Even being the antidote to the college boy doesn’t completely free you from the conscriptions of your imagination. He loved Moby Dick and he became a fisherman. Growing up he felt he was the ugly outcast. When he discovered Henry Chianski, his feelings made sense and he began to adorn his body with disfiguring tattoos in lieu of acne vulgaris. I also process fiction like this; many of us do. We all have small ways of emulating the lives of unreal people we hoped we’d become. The line of truth between him and me was that I was a woman, a pretty Southern woman, wholly uncomfortable in my skin. What I felt like in my soul was the heedless wanderer, the working-class hero, the undereducated alpha. I was imprisoned by my culture, by my body. He was my most realized attempt to escape, and it didn’t work. 

by joan brown

We grew up, and our memories of the people we were together became more foreign to us. He traveled the world, settled in San Francisco, then L.A., became a fashion maven, a filmmaker. I lingered in the South, pitifully literary and resisting as many cultural traditions as I could: a permanent, pointless rebel in a land where rebellion was a regional myth, not a pastime.

We remained in touch, emailing every now and then over the years, saying nothing in particular. I married a lithe Texas hippie and moved to Northern Italy. I grew more miserable. Married life hurt me and Italian culture stifled me even more than I was used to. I was in the most meaningful relationship I’d ever known and was totally at odds with the concept of losing the fiction of myself for this greater cause. I drank in my resistance, and in my drinking, revealed I was no different at all from the angry little person I was eight years ago, clawing and snapping, physically struggling against the person who says they know better than me, and is saying so because they love me.

The blistering morning this spring I conceded and decided to get sober, I came across a piece of crushing news. This Bama, my sailor of yore, had thrown himself headfirst into the bay beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. He broke his neck, his back, and shattered both his femurs, but survived. Just as I always believed, he is a miracle. How we managed to twin our suffering for so long, I have no idea. True, I have never quite reached the dark heart of despair that he has, but crashing into cold tiled floors, screaming at the sunset from the top of a medieval wall, tearing at my chest, I feel I have come close. And how strange that we surfaced almost at the same time? Immediately I sent him a note of condolence and he wrote back, gushing with wisdom and positivity: “Realize you are perfect right now. Everything is okay and everything can change in an instant to the life you always wanted. No matter what. When you are happy and hopeful your husband will be happy and hopeful.” I have a postcard he made in the hospital, a watercolor of a green face with a giant blue and pink eye, in the style of a Toltec carving, inscribed with a quote on the back from one of his friends there, “Maybe life’s not as hard as you thought it was.” I am already, almost instantly better. I just hope that he is also now free.

Natalie Elliott is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about being in a great man's bed. She writes the column Miss On Scene for The Oxford American. You can find her twitter here.

Paintings by Joan Brown.

"Here's To You" - Picnic (mp3)

"I'm Here" - Picnic (mp3)

The new album from Picnic is entitled The Weather's Fine.

by joan brown