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Here is a long blog entry that may or may not relate to my song, Atlas.

Yesterday I went on a hike with friends to Powell Butte Nature Park here in Portland, Oregon USA. It was so fun!

I’ll give away the punch line right now: half of this “nature park” is under construction, part of a large water-system development project to build covered reservoirs that will replace Portland’s beautiful uncovered reservoirs in compliance with new Federal regulations of some sort or another. A lady with a traffic flag waved us away from the Nature Park’s lot entrance to park along the street instead. Bulldozers and trucks kicked dust up as they passed the temporary bathrooms and offices built for the contractors and workers. We’re a good humored bunch, and the sun was out, so we parked, grabbed our packs, and treaded fearlessly into the construction zone up towards a patch of old growth trees peaking out from over the top of the butte.

The mulch-lined path meandered up the incline along the chainlink fence separating the development from the wild grass and trees, and my friends put on hilarious purple scarf masks and sunglasses to fend off construction dust (a little drag in your hiking bag goes a long way). I walked in a bit of a noise-inspired stupor, staring down at the mulch as the wood chips jostled in my vision into feather-like patterns, indescribably beautiful. My friends laughed and joked up ahead, and I fell into a dark, inward reverie that came to define the day. I’d been mixing this song, “Atlas,” all week, and had performed it the night before on Live Wire radio, so the themes of the song were hot on my mind: depression, the earth, all the piles of stuff one owns. The song doesn’t spell a lot out, but it points.

The path angled into the patch of old growth woods which wrapped around from the western ridge to the southern ridge. At this point a hilariously huge pipe – think Alaskan Oil Pipeline – emerged from the ground to accompany us. Steely blue with rivets and bolts and clamps, we all seemed to get queazy – the fun of our jokes about the construction (“Oh that’s where they’re putting in the Target! The nature is this way…”) seemed to dissipate as we walked along this ominous snakey thing, a very permanent fixture. But 100 feet further, when the pipe dipped below the path to dramatically dive down along the ground of the steep ridge through dappled sunlight and moss, we all paused to look at how beautiful the thing looked. It glowed with an iridescent blue through the sprouts and leaves, and as we turned to look back along the path we had just walked, even there it looked beautiful from this different perspective.

I’ve often felt like I’m learning to surf and do tricks on the very last long wave in on Earth. An irrepressible desire to make beautiful things seems pretty useless when backdropped by irreversible climate change, dying species, vast violence against the earth and people alike. I’ve tried to integrate my own sensitive disposition with the fact that I’m likely witnessing a pretty dark passage of the planet – a goal that’s rich fuel for a mental mood-spiral into the abyss. In the song “Atlas,” a boy wakes and bakes to still his depressed mind from all the thoughts of a diseased life that he can’t seem to change. I think everyone’s had that kind of experience at least once. I personally got myself off of anti-depressants after many years trying and failing, but this song isn’t a celebration of success: it’s a dispatch from the very turning point between possibility and hopelessness, where Atlas just ends up cursing at the sky, wondering who put all the burdens of hope on him, anyway. Nothing brakes the wave, nothing changes, and Atlas goes back on the drugs.

Further along the path, my friends had climbed a huge vein of moss covered boulders. Ross and my boyfriend Blake sat on the boulders and ate bananas, and Kevin spread an ultramarine blue and white striped towel on the ground picnic-style. Again, there was this incredible iridescent blue color, filling my eyes and heart with a kind of primal spiritual response. Like a glowing Rothko painting.

The whirlwind of spiraling thoughts in my head entrained towards the talking part of my brain like a fast gear pressed into a slow one. It’s funny how many seemingly useless things you can think in a flash of thought before you manage to articulate just one of them over the course of a few stammering seconds. “Did you know,” I orated, “that until the 1800s, all of the ultramarine blue pigment in all of the art in the world came from one 6000-year-old mine in Afghanistan?”

Ross, who’s an amazing artist, guessed the name of the color. “Lapis Lazuli?”

“Yeah, it comes from a place called Lazuli. Lapis means stone.” My friend Leo Sunshine had told me this the weekend before. Leo makes and trades in beads and pendants polished from everything from semi-precious stones to bowling balls. Leo told me that the ground Lapis Lazuli formed a pigment so precious and expensive that artists would reserve the thickest use of it for the portions of sky around the heads and faces of the Deities. That’s why Jesus and Mary and the Saints heads always have that amazing blue aura. Economy of materials.

Kevin said, “This blue here,” pointing to the towel. But no, I said, it’s synthetically made now. Still, the synthetic color seemed to be glowing there below him on a wavelength of irrepressible realness, however it was made. And we sat there, in our patch of old growth forest surrounded by construction, and remarked that indeed, there was something amazing about the glowing blue towel spread there against the dirt, against the mossy trees and rocks, in the dappled sunlight through the leaves on the trees, on this gorgeous warm winter’s day on the top of Powell Butte Nature Park.

Later my friends headed over a bent section of fencing up a ridge, and lagging behind my wandering reverie eyes tuned into the lichen and moss covered bark on the Eastern facing side of an old Doug Fir. Sunny Southern bark seems to me to ridge into points like the bow of a ship, heroic and flanked by wake-like edges. As it feathers around to the Eastern and Western sides, it looks like turbulence or the interference pattern of two different sets of waves intersecting. Beautiful diamond shapes and criss-crossing forms formed from 150 years of the heroic northern bark intersecting with the more bulked up, anti-heroic Southern bark. I don’t know a lot about trees but I often notice this about the bark – like the sun is a great wind, and the bark spells out the story of that wind as it shapes the bark struggling against it’s force over time. I took out my camera, which is also my phone. When i pressed the magic button, I noticed I had a text from Howie. Howie works with Storm Large and was asking for tips for good venues in San Francisco. “Great American, or anywhere left that’s indie,” I wrote, thinking about big money corporate development and how it snuffs out all the tasty details. Then I noticed I had some email, and I went deeper into the iRabbit-hole.

Five minutes later my boyfriend came along and I looked up, and immediately started to apologize for lagging behind on a forest trail for typing into my phone. “It’s just that I was staring at this bark,” I yammered, “thinking about how everyone wants to be heroic like the Southern bark, but we’re all really stuck in the turbulent wake on the sides or packed in and stoic like the North side. Then I wanted to take a picture, but saw Howie’s text and felt like I needed to plug independent venues.”

He smiled and suggested I turn off my phone camera, which I did.

Later in another of my inward brain-attack moments, Blake found a type of tree whose sprouting leaves are known to taste like cucumbers. He gave us each a piece, and as the decisively cucumber-like flavor hit my tongue, my brain attack faded into the slow-gear speed of immediate presence and sensation. One of the many reasons I love my boyfriend.

As it turns out, there is no big punch line to this blog entry, or rather, maybe you can craft your own in the comment. Something about dispatches from the turbulent meeting point of the past and the future, or Will We Save the Earth, or how to go down with the ship and still look cool, calm and fabulous. I hope you enjoy Atlas, and I hope you’ll pre-order and pledge-fund the new album right now on my kickstarter page.

xo
Holcombe

Survival Hikers Blake, me, Kevin and Ross. Ross is creating artwork for my new album, which will include Lapis Lazuli.

Two recent song posts: Today I posted Winter Song #8, “The Unicorn” and, a few weeks ago, I posted the song “Into the Dark Unknown (The Marriage Song).”

Both of these songs deal with universal issues at the heart of love, but they also articulate my personal response to the way GLBT people such as myself are still cast as social outsiders, even today. For some reading, it might surprise you to think of gays and lesbians as “outsiders” – what about “Will & Grace,” you say? Hmm… The GLBT population, ranking in around 2-5% of the population by most estimates, is the target of an ongoing collusion of religious institutions and conservative political forces dedicated to creating structural stigmas (enshrining into law the idea that GLBT people are “second class citizens”), using both coded and blatant language to portray GLBT people as “dangerous” (i.e., “protect the children,” or “protect marriage” – from what?), and leveraging the emotions over issues of GLBT equality to polarize people and rally people toward discrimination. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately, because of the current California Supreme Court Trial to overturn Proposition 8.

The “Perry v. Schwarzenegger” case is fascinating, and I highly recommend reading more about it. Let me suggest a few links. Witness testimony ended Wednesday, and the Judge has requested a month’s time to review evidence and prepare questions for the lawyers’ closing arguments. From the website for the American Foundation for Equal Rights, a non-profit started to support the case against Proposition 8, we have:

• An excellent summary of the case
• A list of recent press about the trial
• The official court transcripts – 12 gripping days of facts!

Additionally, here are a couple amazing reads:

• “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriagem,” the recent Newsweek cover article penned by normally-bad-republican-lawyer (i.e., he just won the recent unlimited corporate campaign spending Supreme Court case ) but-good-guy-in-this-limited-case Ted Olsen. A must read.
• Excellent coverage and commentary from the Prop 8 Trial Tracker blog, delivered in real-time from the YouTube-censored courtroom by Rick Jacobs of The Courage Campaign, including breaking news on the ridiculous shinnanigans that the Defense is trying to whip up.

ProtectMarriage.com stepped in as the Defendents when California refused to defend the discriminatory Prop 8. Protect Marriage created the famous “Gathering Storm” ad in which gay marriage rains down like a biblical storm endangering children and everyone else – the language is coded, but the message is clear: gays and lesbians are dangerous, and must be stopped. Watch, as actors portray terrified doctors, church leaders, and mothers – and revel as the pro-gay “rainbow” image is co-opted into their message of fear:

Amazingly, expert witnesses for both the Plaintiffs and the Defendants testified to debunk every single argument for Proposition 8 that Protect Marriage tried to raise, particularly their claim about harming children. All of the studies and facts presented revealed profound truths that even surprised me to learn: that gays and lesbians are relatively politically powerless despite our media presence; that marriage is an ever evolving institution; that historically same sex marriage has precedents and that “one man one woman” was only a recent tradition suppanting the biblical tradition of polygamy; that children raised by single or same sex parents do not fare worse than their utopic “nuclear family” counterparts; and that gay marriage not only has no harmful effects on heternormative marriage, but it is likely to strengthen the institution by reducing divorce rates attributed to closeted people and by bringing the tradition in line with the Constitution’s intentions for equal rights and protections. What’s more, even Protect Marriage’s expert witnesses testified that children of gay and lesbian parents would benefit from the legal recognition of marriage for their parents. In other words, no rational basis for disallowing gay marriage was left standing, and testimony from both sides proved that structural stigmas (a gay marriage ban is, by definition, a structural stigma – restricting access to a class of people) harm both GLBT people and the children they are raising.

Sometime in 2005, I was visiting my hometown for a friend’s wedding. Saddened by the animus towards my sexual orientation that was enshrined in the anti-gay-marriage laws, I think I had unknowingly compensated by harboring a personal disgust with the entire marriage tradition, altogether. I know a lot of my gay brothers/sisters can relate to this sentiment. Maybe it was this, or maybe it’s just what every late-twenties single person feels when they show up at a friend’s wedding. Needless to say, I was depressed. The ensuing conversation I had with my mom one night, seated at her kitchen table, was the inspiration for “Into the Dark Unknown (The Marriage Song).” She shared some tough love, and good advice. She said it’s not a picnic for any of us. Each of us has to be the way we must be, and while this may be partly defined in partnership, we’re each on our own path. At the time, I think this song was as much about shedding the “tethered weights” of discrimination as it was about letting myself live up to my own true self, not the weighty expectations imposed by society, tradition, and the various internalized forms of those constructs that I was harboring and protecting within my heart. That’s something everyone can relate to.

Things have really changed for me since I wrote this song, and I am lucky enough to be on my own path with an exceptionally awesome man real close at hand. But when I wrote “The Unicorn,” I was not feeling so great about relationships. I was embroiled in one of my earliest profound attractions. It’s worth me mentioning that I didn’t come out until I was 21, and I didn’t kiss a guy until I was 22 (my inner homophobe literally would come out – ever try kissing a homophobe of the same sex as you? Well, I was that person). While most people work out all the madness of crazy pheromonal attraction in adolescence and college, I seemed not to get to it until my late twenties. In other words, I started young with loving, awesome mature relationships – and worked backwards. Don’t worry, I’ve recovered.

So withholding details to protect the innocent, “The Unicorn” is the result of a kind of surrealist “automatic writing” exercise I employed as a coping strategy after having a head-spinning hook-up with a hot closeted fellow I was kind of working with way back when. The level and intensity of attraction undid me. I sat and wrote the song in one brief sitting, a linear poetic recollection of a dream, a dream that was clearly emotionally connected with this brief obsessive fling, but that I couldn’t rationalize or explain. And what’s more, I wasn’t really his cup of tea – daggers in the eyes! Daggers in the eyes! The whole experience lived in a scary fantasy world I couldn’t understand. I was grappling with the power of love and lust and trying to pick up the rubble of my self-esteem. The origins of this song may seem ridiculous, but it’s one of those pieces that came from an inspired place that I can’t really control. I sat down and recorded the piano and vocal in one take. Recently, I added a Wurlitzer part to give it shape. That, in a nutshell, is “The Unicorn.”

Lest we forget how much irrational love and lust have to do with the “ancient tradition of marriage,” Betty Bowers (“America’s Best Christian” – indeed!) has laid it out for us, in plain language:

In the end, love is a crazy mess for everyone, but we all deserve the right to form family bonds and have our relationships respected by the state. Separate is not equal – another amazing thing that Ted Olsen and David Boies showed in the trial. Marriage confers both rights and social meaning that is not matched by “civil unions” or “domestic partnerships.” Separate but equal didn’t stand up to scrutiny for other minorities – and there is no standing rational argument left for gays and lesbians, either.

Let freedom ring people! Equality now. We’ve got bigger fish to fry – like saving the planet! Love and truth must lead the way. It’s time to take out the garbage, and repeal Proposition 8, yo.