Stacy Horn

“What you’ve done right, and what you’ve done wrong can come out in the music.” – Patrick Costello. Isn’t that a great quote? Anyway, this is me learning frailing … (more below).

I hauled out my banjo last night, and found a banjo lesson on YouTube made by a very nice banjo player named Patrick Costello. I love this style. When I first bought my banjo I started by learning bluegrass picking, and it just wasn’t fun. Weirdly. Bluegrass is fun to listen to, but I just didn’t enjoy playing it. Frailling is more fun. It has an old-time, O Brother sense to it. I could see coming upon some old guy with a beautiful voice playing this style down by a river in the middle of nowhere in the south, singing folk songs most people have forgotten.

Plus the beginner stuff is easier. (Although I am doing it totally wrong. Your thumb is supposed to rest on the 5th string until you pluck it.) I also love that you don’t need to wear picks to play this style. I hated the picks. It separated you from the instrument in a way that also contributed to making it less fun.

The banjo I have is not really right for it, although it will do. But it occurred to me that I might be able to modify it to make it work better. I could remove the resonater (on the back) and the armrest which gets in the way of the arm movement that goes with this style. I emailed the place I bought it from to see if this could be done.

I picked up my banjo again after checking out a hip hop class and then taking an African drumming class at a place called Djoniba yesterday. I saw a show about aging and brain elasticity on channel 13 the night before and was moved to learn something new. The key is finding something you actually love and therefore might continue.

Finn and Buddy spot a pigeon. Watch their tails! Poor little guys. They so long to get a pigeon. (Those are my King Bay Library flowers on the left.)

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but it rained again and the whole building got flooded, the fire department came, they had to break down part of the ceiling, there were power problems, you had to wade through water in all the halls. It was bad. So now the landlord has guys up on the roof, except it’s not actual professional roofing guys. It’s their regular handymen guys. They are pound, pound, pounding away up there and I’m pretty sure something bad is going to happen. They don’t really know what they are doing.

I went out to Brooklyn on Tuesday to do a reading at the Kings Bay branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. They gave me flowers at the end, which I brought home and re-arranged into two lovely bouquets. I had a great time. The attendees asked some of the best questions I’ve ever been asked. Thank you for inviting me, Kings Bay, and thank you for the flowers.

I went out walking afterwards. The best picture I took is out of focus, as per usual. It was a shot of a sign inside a fishing store, showing the prices for chum, blood worms, sand worms, earth worms, squid and sand eels. For the record, chum costs the most.

I hate that apparently I can’t hold a camera still. But here is a shot at the end of a small alley of houses. It’s too picture-postcard-y, I know. It was a nice little row of houses. I’d like to find some old wood house with fireplaces nearby to renovate and live in.

This was a tacky statue outside a restaurant. Not far from this spot, a new housing development was near completion, but the word on various Brooklyn blogs is that it will be filled with the families of Italian and Russian mobsters. So even in my fantasies, I will not be living there.

I took this on the river yesterday. Howard was working, and I was reading something called One Shot. But imagine being J. K. Rowling. Christ. I would love to just once, ONCE come upon someone reading one of my books. Nevermind walking around and seeing everyone reading it. People all up and down the Hudson River yesterday were reading the new Harry Potter.

Yesterday I read about two local artists who committed suicide, Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan. I’d never heard of them before, but I read the article because I’m always curious about people who go voluntarily into something I do everything I can to avoid. There’s a post about them on Gothamist today, and so I was reading the comments section because I’m also curious about other people who are curious like myself.

One of the commentors posted that Theresa had a blog and that she had recently posted about an MK Ultra thing called Project Monarch, and maybe there’s a connection. MK Ultra was the name for a CIA program that did research in mind control. I looked up Project Monarch because when I looked into MK Ultra for my book I never came across even the name Project Monarch. But I didn’t research MK Ultra heavily, I mostly wanted to compare the work at the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory with the direction our government took into mind and consciousness research (hint: not at all the same). It wasn’t particularly meaningful that I never heard of it.

If you google Project Monarch what you mostly find are entries about a couple who wrote about Project Monarch, Cathy O’Brien and Mark Phillips. You have to google this stuff yourself, I don’t know how I could even begin to summarize, mind control, sex slaves, multiple personality disorder.

My immediate reaction is, I don’t know if there ever was a Project Monarch, I’m willing to believe that there was, and that they may have begun some of the experiments described. Our government has attempted some pretty nutty stuff over the years, and not with the noblest of aims, but I don’t know about these two at all. They say things like Hillary Clinton knows all about this, but takes it in stride as just your typical government stuff. Insane. Although J. B. Rhine did come up against this problem where clearly troubled people would tell their stories. They were completely delusional, they’d outright lie and exaggerate, but sometimes their stories began with one element of truth. Who knows.

So that brings me back to Theresa Duncan. I browsed her blog a little. The fact that she accepted Project Monarch without question is a little out there. Plus, she just killed herself. I wonder what Duncan and Blake’s friends and the professional community around them make of this? Blake was represented by a gallery and was in a few Whitney Biennials.

Theresa quoted Reynolds Price on her blog. “A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens–second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence …”

Sadly, I gotta strongly disagree with that. I think millions suffer in almost near silence. Lots of people have no audience for their stories, or keep quiet for a wide variety of reasons.

I was talking to Howard the other day, about the beginning of an idea for my next book. I don’t even quite remember it, something about wrongful death. People dying for causes that turn out to be nothing, or executed for crimes that they didn’t commit, I forget where I was going with it exactly, but I was inspired by a painter named Tina Mion. The painting above is one of hers. It will come back to me.