camillacream

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This place has been a holy grail for me for years and I’m glad I finally got to see it: the Joshua Tree Inn where my beloved Gram Parsons died in room #8.

“Twenty thousand roads I went down down down...and they all led me straight back home to you.”

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In Austin, Texas, I fell in love with the great-tailed grackle. These birds were everywhere and they were beautiful with their blue-black iridescence, but also kinda scary because they’re big and loud and intimidating like crows. It’s hard to convey their majesty in a photo, especially when they fly or flare out their tails. And the sounds they make! They’re like an Edgar Allan Poe poem come to life.

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I could travel the South taking pictures of cool signs at dining establishments:

biscuits at the Loveless Cafe in Nashville, migas at the Magnolia Cafe in Austin.

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I ❤️ Austin. SLACKER was such a formative movie for me that being there was almost a religious experience. I hope it doesn’t lose its funkiness as it becomes more popular and populated. #portlandofthesouth

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Hattie B’s hot chicken. Ernest Tubb’s record store. Ryman Auditorium, the mother church of country music. I ❤️ Nashville.

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“A sense of isolation, of pinpointed and transfixed helplessness under the stars, of being left alone, unheard, and unaided to face some final fated darkness and engulfment slowly advancing across the years toward me . . . that has hung over me all my life."

— noir writer Cornell Woolrich

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Brief Encounter (1945) dir. David Lean

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“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.

How I came to it I cannot rightly say, so drugged and loose with sleep had I become when I first wandered there from the True Way.”

— Dante’s Inferno

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“I greet you from the other side

Of sorrow and despair

With a love so vast and shattered

It will reach you everywhere”

— Leonard Cohen

(this is what I imagine my mother saying to me now that she’s dead. I strangely feel her watching over me from whatever there is after death.)

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On my way back to the U.S. I had a 12-hour layover in Venice, Italy, so I got to spend the day there. I have to admit that at first I didn’t like it—it felt like a Disneyland version of a place. But the more and more I walked through the narrow, winding streets deep into the heart of the city, I began to fall in love with the mystery and romance of Venice. It’s truly beautiful, mystical, and magical and worth every bit of its reputation. I didn’t want to leave and wished I could disappear into its alleys like Donald Sutherland in Nicolas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW. I even stepped into a church to light a candle for my mother and thank her for this wonderful gift of a day she gave to me. Just the perfect place to contemplate life’s mysteries, death, decay, time, mortality, and impermanence.

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I’m back from my trip to Europe for my mother’s funeral. Needless to say it was traumatic and emotional but also transformative and healing. I feel so profoundly changed. I hadn’t been back to Croatia since I was 6 years old. I got to see all the relatives I hadn’t seen in decades and felt enveloped by the warmth and love of family. I don’t have any extended family in the U.S. so now I know what I’ve been missing my whole life.

It was also incredibly moving to be in my ancestral homeland: everyone there looks like me, speaks my language, has my name. It’s like there’s this place where I belong and I never even knew it. I often wish my parents had never immigrated—I feel robbed of my people and place in the world.

Here are some photos of my parents’ home villages. Look at the crumbling beauty of Eastern Europe! Also note my last name comes from the town where my father is from (Bencici).

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Electra on Azalea Path by Sylvia Plath

The day you died I went into the dirt,

Into the lightless hibernaculum

Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard

Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.

It was good for twenty years, that wintering --

As if you never existed, as if I came

God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly:

Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.

I had nothing to do with guilt or anything

When I wormed back under my mother's heart.

Small as a doll in my dress of innocence

I lay dreaming your epic, image by image.

Nobody died or withered on that stage.

Everything took place in a durable whiteness.

The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill.

I found your name, I found your bones and all

Enlisted in a cramped necropolis,

Your speckled stone askew by an iron fence.

In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead

Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower

Breaks the soil. This is Azalea Path.

A field of burdock opens to the south.

Six feet of yellow gravel cover you.

The artificial red sage does not stir

In the basket of plastic evergreens they put

At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot,

Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye:

The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red.

Another kind of redness bothers me:

The day your slack sail drank my sister's breath

The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth

My mother unrolled at your last homecoming.

I borrow the stilts of an old tragedy.

The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry

A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;

My mother dreamed you face down in the sea.

The stony actors poise and pause for breath.

I brought my love to bear, and then you died.

It was the gangrene ate you to the bone

My mother said; you died like any man.

How shall I age into that state of mind?

I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,

My own blue razor rusting in my throat.

O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at

Your gate, father -- your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.

It was my love that did us both to death.

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RIP to my dear strong mother. I wish your life had been easier. May you find the peace and beauty you deserved and I hope I see you again in the afterlife if there is one.

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I’m crushed to report that my mother died today. I’ve already been so devastatingly sad lately and now I don’t know what I’m gonna do with all this pain.

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“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

— James Joyce

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“Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass,

of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind...”

— William Wordsworth

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“I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.”

— Song of Solomon