In her luminous, ethereal novels Ecstasia and Primavera, Dayna Desaste’s favorite author, Francesca Lia Block, tells the vivid story of Calliope, Rafe, Dionisio and Paul: the members of rock band, Ecstasia. The band lives in a marvelous land called Elysia, a place full of glitter and glamour, a place where nobody grows old. They fear what lies beneath the city- a hellish land called Underground where the old go to die. Stories are told of the Desert, a place where the old and young alike may live in harmony, a land with real flowers and creatures and fruits. Each setting becomes a character in itself, each place, a different personality. What kind of people populate these lands? Which world do you belong to?
There were turning stages where you could ride carved horses and swans, glass palace bars where you could sip champagne until your blood became gold and luminous. It was a place where I could go to sing and be applauded, dress like a princess, crowned with diamond and ruby flowers. - Primavera
Elysia, the devil city of dreams. A hedonist’s paradise. A city of decadence and youth, where clockwork children dance on a carousel stage, suck on candies and nibble at tarts. Where music shudders from the depths of diamond rhinestone acid-rain dribbled nightclubs. Feathers and fur and sequins cling to your flesh like a new skin. Where time stands still. Trance drum beats, liquid ambrosia wine, mechanical doll heart. Every day a carnival, every night a party. Club kids and clowns.
Are you a decadent darling, do you live for shimmer? Can you feel the beat of the song in your heart as you dance under the glowing lights and neon and glitter? As a citizen of the Hedonist’s paradise, you may enjoy:
Throwing a lavish Rococo costume ball for all your friends
Wearing rhinestones on your face among glittery shadows and glosses
Making paper flowers and birds to hang from your celling
Buying a
Pullip or
Blythe doll and dressing her to the nines
Interpreting your dreams
Starting a rock band that covers Ecstasia songs
Learning circus acts such as the tightrope and trapeze
Here there were no candy-colored lights, no people dressed as angels, as cocktails, Egyptian wall paintings, cowboys, Indians, or dolls… The buildings were blank, windowless, impenetrable. The only light came from a row of gray street lamps. - Ecstasia
Underground - the place where the old go to die. Full of Hell’s hounds and ash boys. Drugs and the dying wrapped in plaster casts. Maddening gargoyles, ravens with beaky, human’s head faces. The Doctor with his potions and powders, a beat of the Poet or a hit of Beauty and the Beast to calm your spirit. The river that will spit out your voice, leaving you unable to sing. The train cars full of mirrors and dolls. Music makes your ears bleed, you live for the silent, for sleep. The red neon of sign screaming “Under” paints your face crimson- no glitter stars or disco balls to illuminate your eyes. Now close your eyes babydoll, and go to sleep.
Can one find you dancing Under, Underground? Are you an Ash Boy or Ash Girl at heart? Trust me you’ll love:
Reading the obituaries over black coffee and a cigarette
Painting your face like a skull
Making a plaster cast mask of your face, or even your entire body
Writing a poem about things you have lost
Studying gargoyles and chimeras
Invent your own creatures through an
exquisite corpseOnce, I lived in the desert. The sands blew, parching my eyes and throat. I worked all day long among the skull rocks, trying to make the cracked earth yield something green. - Ecstasia
The Desert is dead, is death, but hiding under sands and rocks are greens and gardens and jewel-toned flora flowers. Somehow, mysteriously, this barren land is more alive than Elysia could ever be. No rain to fall and soothe their parched lips, the sun beating down on heavy shoulders, it is a place for the clear-minded, it is a place to think. The rough hide of a drum skin, the weathered faces. Lizards and snakes and tepee tent houses. What can make the roses grow, the rivers flow and ebb?
Enjoy the peace and serenity of the Desert? Escaping the demons that chased you from Elysia? Survive in this barren place. Try: Attending the Burning Man Festival
Getting a pet lizard. Name it after a Greek god or goddess.
Meditating every morning.
Learning the hand drums
Making your own moccasins
Having a picnic in the desert.
I lived in paradise… I inhaled the moist green-tinged air, the white-sweet feast of gardenias and the fruity red wine of the roses. Sunlight squinted through the leaves onto my bare freckled shoulders. - Primavera
The desert has become a paradise. Cool water falls from the sky. Roses and lilies sprout. The Earth is lush because of your song. Sing and dance and listen to the birds call. Hold a festival for the moon. You can see the stars here. There are trees and clear water and animals with real beating hearts and blood. Scattered flowers and fruit. There are faces, old and young. And there is death, yes, but rebirth soon follows. The Desert, dry and dead, reborn like a phoenix into paradise.
Does the Earth sing your song? Flowers and fruit and palms and rivers and sand. Do you have the healing touch that can make the flowers grow? Try:
Stargazing. Learn the position of the constellations
Planting a garden full of tropical flowers
Holding a rain dance
Wearing butterflies and fresh flowers in your hair
Singing to your garden. See if the plants grow any bigger or brighter.
Picking a flower and planning your entire outfit around it
Making a dinner using only food you have grown yourself
November 19th, 2008
I have fun with my clothes onstage; it’s not a concert you’re seeing, it’s a fashion show. - Freddie Mercury
Jules has been listening to Queen ever since she was a toddler. Her dad used to spin their records and she would dance around the living room screaming and kicking and dancing in wild little fits. When Freddie Mercury died, she was only five years old and she watched the television with big dewey tears in her eyes. Freddie was her hero, he couldn’t go away! Now she is a sequin and leather wearing debutante rock goddess, playing in an all-girl Queen cover band called Princess. On Friday nights she prowls the stage, arching her back as she sings. Singing for Princess is her life, her passion and her dream. She wants to start a record label for her band and for other groups carrying on Mr. Mercury’s legacy.
Candice plays drums for Princess. She first discovered Queen when she heard “I Want to Break Free” at a friend’s sleepover party in middle school. Never before had she known music could sound so epic. Now she is a candy-colored cupcake of a girl, threading feathers into her hair and skipping down sidewalks. On Saturdays, when she doesn’t have to work in the tiny boutique on Main Street, she spends the mornings sipping lemonade through a crazy straw and reading the comics from the newspaper. Her hair is always a vibrant shade of cyan blue or passionate, rose-colored pink. When she is playing the drums, her hair whips around her like angel’s wings.
When Jules and Candice first auditioned Teal as guitarist for Princess, they were shocked to see how hard the girl rocked. Teal looked the part of a “Killer Queen” with her perfectly curled hair and gold Chanel-polished nails and designer dresses. She smoked cigarettes from a long black cigarette holder and pouted her lips as though she were impatiently waiting on her butler to serve her a dainty slice of strawberry cake. Teal loved decadence, her heroes were obvious: Marie Antoinette and Coco Chanel. It saddened her however when people viewed her as a snobby little brat. Just because she liked the finer things in life, people assumed that she wasn’t hardworking or generous. Teal’s closest friends knew her passion for guitar playing and volunteering at the animal shelter. She would spend the afternoons reading poetry or knitting scarves. “Decadence,” she would say, “is a state of mind, not a fashion statement.”
Angela is jumping around the stage, plucking away at the bass strings during Princess’s cover of “Another One Bites the Dust”. When Angela is playing bass she feels powerful; music making is the best feeling in the world, in her opinion. Angela has a fetish for gold and leather, she is almost never seen without her leather jacket and her fingers are decorated with stacks of chunky gold rings. Angela writes for her campus newspaper where she reviews music, offering her tongue-in-cheek humor to the usually dull entertainment section. One day she wants to start her own magazine, a combination of madcap satire and music news. For now, however, she’ll just stick to earning her journalism degree and playing with Princess.
November 8th, 2008
I want to move northwards and I want to end wars. I want to dance in cornfields and sleep in forests and drown in the beauty of the San Francisco sea side air. And eat up the stained glass windows at a French cathedral full of dappled bejeweled lights. Watching the colors trace my eyes and dance upon the iris turning everything into the Technicolor dreamopolis I saw in my sleep. And I’ll read poetry in the necropolis. And go busking in the metropolis. And carry around flowers that I’ve picked in some wild field in North Dakota.
I want to be a citizen, not of anywhere, but of everywhere. I want a world where I am not afraid to speak. Where guns are not hidden in knapsacks and closets, but stored under a museum glass with a card that reads: “this machine murders humans-it is dangerous and inhumane” …Where men are not afraid to love men where woman are not afraid to speak where all the colors of the world dance together to become one.
And if I walk a mile in the suicide bomber’s shoes- those ordinary street shoes with the tiny bombs embedded in the soles- what will I find? I wonder if he is a madman, a heretic, or maybe he will share my point of view, but has soiled his dreams with reality and apathy: no world can be changed by happy thoughts and white doves and ravens with olive branches in their beaks alone. I wonder if he did not intend to kill a city block worth of innocent people in a crowded Pakistani square, but if he did it to die like the gods: set afire, immolated dreams. The harsh reality that revolutions often flicker out like flames. It brings tears to my eyes. I just want a bloodless revolution and some angel with bat wings singing peace off the mountaintops: “peace on earth and good will to men!” Why do those words seem so heavy now?
9 million people a year die from poverty related causes. Over 30000 Americans have died in a blood war started almost a decade ago. Our own country contributes to over 50% of the world’s war spending.
And when you meditate on thoughts like these it is difficult to not fear life and grow deep into one’s sorrow. What happened to the peaceful days of childhood? Thirty years ago, when our parents were children, were they warned of things like this? The world wars of yesterday are but a romanticized television pilot where yes, it seems okay to kill because this man is your enemy by the nature of the god-given, almighty law. Oh the sad retreat of brainwashed children, told that another man could be his enemy for simply living on a separate island half way round the world.
Oh sick brainwashed children. If you pray that Hiroshima was purposeful and good, have you not seen the way that people curled their backs and burnt like candles and turned to ash under clouds of black? Their shadows painted onto walls, their eyes melting out of their skulls. How can one death justify another? How can any death set another man free?
And I am thinking about suicide bombers and self immolation and kamikaze planes. Oh true, I am certain that there are those, the majority, with a damned purpose to kill… as if murder would make them a god. But what of the failed revolutionary, the argonaut who never found the golden fleece, those who seek a ribbonless goal of peace and justice, who have realized that their actions have done more harm than good, who are blinded by their false gods, who are caught up in some anachronistic version of liberty and failed, failing mortal sacrifice, who jump off cliffs out of desperation and burn buildings to set the soul gardens free and drown planes so that they will end among others scared that tomorrow will end oh in the darkest fields and shadowless blacks. That tomorrow is just a darker today. What do we make of these silent dreamers? These suicide revolutions?
Hope is the solution, for without hope I would be a but the wick swallowed by the ether flame. I would be the one with the molotov cocktail and the pursed lips and the bleak mind. Hope that tomorrow is lit with peaceful candles, that doves may fly in a piercing blue sky and that wars may end. And yes I know it to be true- that this bliss will not bring about change, but the ideal of it all must linger in our throats like slow whiskey, it must burn our hearts. It must burn in our souls like a inextinguishable flame. Hope will feed the fire, it will be our motivation. It must remain in our hearts for fear of escaping our minds. Hope lost sets the body a’fire. It is the reason why men burn in suicide crashes and fall to the ground like dead leaves. Hope lost sets the world a’fire, hope in our hearts will bring about change.
If you forget that peace can exist and that change can happen, then the world will end for you. If you hope and dream and create the world you want to see and vote and protest and dance at every revolution then there will always be a place for us, for the lovers.
And I’m thinking about soldiers and sailors and whalers and wayfaring men. Of crack addicts and players and blind prophets and bombs in shoes. Of guns in cases and fireless hearts and peaceful doves and angels with bat wings who sing songs to the highest bidder and plant rosary beads in the ground like seeds. Of mice and men and cats chasing rats and business suit babies and fields of flowers. Of megalopolises and necropolises and dreamscapes and cars with wings and girls with scarred feet and bookstores in birdcages and treehouses and carports and aeroports and audiences and atoms and scientists and solitude and world peace. And maybe one day the beginning to end all the endings.
November 4th, 2008
