HOORAY. Winter really IS over.....

....as evidenced by what I saw when I opened my door to walk to the train. Leaves and sunshine and one of those groovy little Dr. Suess cherry blossom trees that make everything look like a fun little, happy world throughout May.
Hope you all enjoyed the gorgeous weather this past weekend. I did my first, proper ocean walk yesterday and it made me so happy.

Happy Spring y'all! xoxo

No. We didn't have one of these in Illinois.

My friend sent this photo to me, and then later, in person, asked me:
"Do they have any of these kinds of swings in front of houses in the town you grew up in, in Illinois?"

Hell-I KNOW I don't give off that vibe! (He was teasing, of course. At least, I think so)
But, PLEASE tell me. This cannot be real!

SOTD Danni Green - The Man With The Child In His Eyes *Kate Bush Cover*

This is one of Kate Bush's best songs. And I know, shame on me for not posting her and the original version. I just like this cover.
Most guys I know HATE Kate Bush- how high pitched and fairy dust like her whole music/persona is, but I love her.
One of my best friends in undergrad school was a piano major, and he played and sang this for me at 2 in the morning in one of the music building's practice rooms.
We had smoked a bunch of weed, and I wept. I thought it was so pretty.
And, ok- Kate Bush wrote this song when she was 16!
Who the hell is perceptive enough at 16 to write about the concept of a man having a child in his eyes?
That's why I love her so much as a writer and artist

SOTD-Radiohead play The Smiths

I mean, come on.
Radiohead?
Doing The Smiths?
um..have I died and gone to music heaven?

Ah- The French

Early morning coffee before work this morning with my girlfriend Nina. She's French, and of course, extremely particular about her coffee. We waited ten minutes for this special 'french press' pot of coffee. ugh. She was bossing those little Starbucks guys around in her thick french accent on how to do it.
But she's super pretty, so they were at full attention. :)
Anyway, NOW, I am wide awake and ready for a 9 hour work day. This is some damn strong coffee.

SOTD- Katy Perry - Lost

At first I liked it because it sounds like the little ballerina, tinkle sound that my jewelry box used to make when I was a little girl.
Then, I liked it more when I realized it was the sexy, cute chick who sang about cherry chapstick and kissing girls.
*Been there. Done that.*

But, then I really listened to it- and I really kind of feel the lyrics right now.
It's good. Especially for a simple, contemporary, pop song that is.

I Love Red Lips

.......and I want this damn piece of art.
I saw a friend for her Birthday this weekend at a little bistro and I loved this piece.
It was lips made out of all wine corks.
Was pretty cool.
(the poor guy on the side, I totally disrupted he and his wife's dinner for this one. He was kind about it though)

New Spring Fashion Trend=Boys Happy

...According to a current New York Times style piece.
Bondage, girls. Time to sex up your look for Spring.....so they say

SOTD Lucie Silvas and Charlotte Church - Don't Let Go

Like Susan Boyle- when some women open their mouths to sing, angels come out. I try to sing in my high octave when I can, to keep that part of my voice open, but it is the most challenging range- yet is the sound that is the true sign of a gifted singer.

Charlotte Church was 10 when she made her first best selling record, and she sang like an angel. Truly, like a little angel.
Yet, for me, I always find it so fufilling, being the rock lover I am as well, when an operatic, Broadway voice translates into rock and roll.
I mean, pipes are pipes, and these girls have got 'em.

**And I cannot leave this gem out, either.**

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8g6Tqqc6DQ

Ode to Spring

I saw my first flower box in a boutique window yesterday. Bright, blooming, colorful and happy. Add to that, warmth on my skin from a bright sunshiney sun, and daylight at 6pm- I knew that Spring had FINALLY arrived in New York.
It's been a pretty brutal winter here, y'all. I was a fool to believe that 'global warming' meant things will get 'warmer'. Just mean things are fucked up.
My point is, get some fresh flowers for your house/apt this weekend.
One $8.00 bouquet from the street/market will do. Divide it up into three or four sections. One next to your bed, one next to the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink and another wherever else you would like to add some happy, fresh color.

Giving yourself flowers is a cheap, but sweet thing to do for yourself.
Welcome Spring into your humble abode!

Sick and Tired

I believe in Love
I love life
I have so many ideas and hopes
But today.......
I am sick and tired.
Just fucking sick and tired.
Fucking fuck

Sorry

A real lif Mowgli!!

My family knows that my favorite Disney movie/book has always been The Jungle Book. My favorite Disney character has also always been little jungle boy Mowgli.
And look......walking down the stairs of the train today, I saw a mom and her little Spanish baby girl, who looked just like a real life Mowgli!!!
She even danced for me. How precious!

SOTD-Peace of Mind - Boston

"I understand about indecision,
and I don't care if I get behind
People livin' in competition,
All I want is to have my peace of mind."

......take a look ahead......

Whoa- Harsh!

.......and this was just posted on a mini billboard in broad daylight.
Only in New York.
Dove soap you guys.
Me so confused! (but humoured nonetheless)

My boys

These are two of my dearest friends- Eric and Teddy-out to dinner at The Paradise recently.
Aren't they precious? Love them so much.

SOTD Whiskey Falls - Last Train Running

It's a sunny Sunday.
It's a country song kinda afternoon.
Time for a little harmonizing and geee--taar.

I love this one currently.

LOST

SOTD Spoon - "The Underdog"

Man--this sooo would have been my song in High School.

What a kick ass tune.
We, the underdogs, WILL take over the world.

And it reminds me, I gotta find a smoking jacket

Modeling?? haha

I love when people I used to know from High School in Illinois run into me when I visit or now, when they find me on Facebook, and they ALWAYS assume the following. Because I modeled in High School. I mean, come on. I am not material for Seventeen Magazine anymore and um.....I'm 5'5!

It just always makes me laugh

Facebook to me

show details 7:03 PM (13 hours ago)

Reply

Tim sent you a message.

Re: BBCHS SUMMER ALUMNI CRUISE - JUNE 20, 2009

"Thank you for the compliment! I see your living in the NY what are you doing modeling or something"

WOW

My best friend Dana from Junior High (who is still back in Illinois) had the sweetest brother Dan. I haven't thought nor heard from him in 25 years. He found me on Facebook, and is, himself, a writer in Chicago.
He is as sweet as ever and I was mouth agape, when I got this thoughtful email from him today after he checked out my blog.
I am grateful and inspired.
**not to mention impressed with his writing as well just in a personal email, I can see his gift as well.
Thank you Dan.
xo


Trenny,

I spent a good couple hours this morning reading your blog and watching the YouTube clips that accompany your text. I must say that you have something here. You think like a punk Joan Didion and I'd say your journalism degree was worth the sweat.

This is only my reading of your work. Though, your prose is strong enough that I feel I must comment because good writing comes along so infrequently on blogs and you really need to start working-up longer pieces. Anyway, here goes my comments and (again) I hope you don't take my reading as anything more than my reading. Life has taught me that truth is perception and most times its best to stick with your stomach.

Firstly, you have quite a voice. You write in simple, declaritive sentences and waste no words. In fact, you write as if each word must be there and it works because you are careful never to clutter your sentences with useless adjectives. An old man editor at Picador once told me that you can tell a natural writer by the athleticism of their sentences. When I asked him what he meant, he just laughed--this guy helped edit Hemingway's last bad novels--and told me that good writers use their verbs like adjectives. You have that gift. I hope you go longer with it. You can write an impressionistic sentence without using an artificial adjective and that is the first major mountain in writing long-form prose.

I see that you already have an idea for a longer piece about why it took you so long to appreciate Bruce Springsteen. If you think about this for a minute, you can truly tell your story while you answer the larger question of how you came to like the carmel-dipped boss. That entry strikes me because I had the same long journey to seeing him as relevant. In fact, he almost embarrassed me and I would walk out of rooms where his songs played. I'd left at 17 and went wandering around the earth and the last thing I wanted to hear was some guy singing about my step-father getting drunk at Skinny's Tap. One day, about 15 years ago, my friend gave me NEBRASKA before I left Ireland and I listened to it while I drove around East Bradley waiting to pick Lauren up from school. "Atlantic City" got my eyes wet right on Broadway and Kennedy Drive in that busted-out factory town ("Put your best dress on. Put your hair up pretty. And meet me tonight in Atlantic City"). It struck me that everything I hated about Springsteen was what I'd spent every day since I was 17 running from: "guys in ripped jeans" as you wrote. Once I realized where I was from, I started writing about it, and my struggle for publication ended. Not that you have to write about families of war veterans, but you have a particular experience in Kankakee that sent you to NYC to find your true self and live your life. If you were to make the Springsteen blog into a longer piece, you should wrap it around some biographical story. Joan Didion does this kind of work in her essay collection SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM. She writes wonderfully about being a young woman in New York when she was really from California's Salinias Valley (farm country like Kankakee). She is great because she became elegant and beautiful and still wrote about loving to walk barefoot amongst the rows of the summer corn.

Mostly, I enjoyed how you used a short anecdote and then had a YouTube clip to make your point. When you wrote of videos (videos I remember you and sis watching in East Bradley) you were the strongest because you often related them back to an interesting biographical point. You meld self and cultural analysis together and balance things in this gray area between squint-eyed irony and sweet nostalgia. If those ideas could translate onto paper, which I think they could, you'd really have something that was both critically-sound and commercial. Remember, I am a literary novelist, the kind who can only sell 50K copies, and not an editor or an agent. But I've been doing the tango with NY Publishing for ten years--which is a minefield at times--and I know what sells at the publishing companies.

I urge you to start the slog of a book. After you pick your best ideas from the blog, you really should sit down and start that shitty first draft--I'm writing one now--which will turn into a good second and fine third but the fourth is sweet like almond gellato in Siracusa. You are a talented writer, Trenny. You can do just as good as half the people I know in publishing. And, the time to write is easy. All I've ever done is two hours in the early morning (optimal), but I write other times when things change. The idea is to just give two hours a day to your work and then leave it alone for the next day. My advice would be to think of a book of related personal essays that also contain some kind of larger political, cultural, or social frame. Your best blog entries do this already, but I'm not going to prejudice your pick so I won't tell you what I liked the most (there were many).

Sorry for the long email. This is my profession so I got pretty excited when I read your work and I saw so many ideas for book of inter-related personal essays. Let me know what you think. In the meantime, just focus on strolling little Jack through the Met and stopping before Pollack's LAVENDER MIST and letting the little guy just stare and follow the dribbles of thrown paint with his gnome eyes.

Best,

Dan

SOTD- Jail House Rock- Elvis Presley

How, how, how has it taken me this long to post my sweet baby Elvis?
Shame on me.

Hey- My two boyfriends made the Rolling Stone Top 100. Sweet!

....and they are an awesome number 5! Good job boys!

You're Not A Tree! haha. Funny, but True!

- "If you don't like where you are, change it. You are not a tree. "
J. Rohn

SOTD Lady GaGa - The Fame

White trash, Miami club, materialistic, etc......whatever my friend says about Lady Gaga, matters none to me.

Her song The Fame had me shaking my booty this morning.

She likes dance, performance art, sex, and fashion. And she delivers what she promises.
Those are many of the top reasons that music works so well anyway. She sure ain't the first (nor will she be the last), to exploit these things.
And man, nothing beats a good, sexy, visual to go along with a good dance song.
Period.

AWWWW-some

@HellaSoundWicked-awesome ladies 2 follow: @bonkless @gordonshumway @PainterNik @lizwebpage @kchealy @runnerkara @trennylynn @JeeForce #followfriday


My twitter friend John posted this @ on Twitter yesterday. And there I am! A 'wicked awesome lady'---at least according to him. That was fun to see on Twitter tonite.
(even though I am a bad user and have only 100 something followers)

...And my friend Seth's quote, who just found me on Facebook...

"You listen bronze. I am the Nightrider. I'm a fuel injected suicide machine. I am the rocker, I am the roller, I am the out-of-controller! I'm the Nightrider, baby,"


Now- that's a good one. I'm jealous

My girl Jenny' s Facebook 'What are you Doing' from today

Jennifer Lee Laks is... "Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." ~ Harold Whitman.

SOTD-Bruce Springsteen - Fire

I used to hate Bruce Springsteen. I've always been more of a 'pretty boy', stylish, David Bowie, The Killers, kind of a chick.

Bruce was:
From New Jersey
He wore ripped up jeans
He seemed dirty
He didn't wear girl's makeup or hairspray (like a good, new wave boy should. lol)
His voice was rough and gravely
He sang about things that seemed too poignant

But, it's funny how you evolve as you become more aware of what good artistry REALLY is.
This song is pretty damn sexy. And pretty well written. He is a man with alot of desire, and alot of things to say. And, one hell of a poet/writer.
The Pointed Sisters made 'Fire' popular, but Bruce is the original writer. And he sings it so much better.

Ladies and Gentlemen. Fire, by Bruce Springsteen

Canvas Quotes @ Barnes & Noble

Barnes and Noble has become quite the 'accessories' book store. I was recently there, and the whole first floor was comprised of coffee mugs, journals, cards, etc....which can be fun. One of my favorite finds were these little stretched canvases with quotes.
One of my favorites as always been the above Thoreau quote.

It's true. Don't feel inadequate if all of the things that you envision for yourself are not in front of you at this very moment. They will all come (and go). The purpose of life is to enjoy the process and just keep going in that direction. There are many, many surprises on your path. Keep your eyes and your heart open.
Love xoxo