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Photographer & writer.
I like art & drinking.
Portland, Oregon
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A Decade of Double Vanity begins one week from today in Louisville, Kentucky.

The album will be performed in full, front to back. 

Featuring a pre-show screening of the unreleased experimental documentary Wanna Wake Up, directed by Jaret Ferratusco.

All dates on sale now.

Mon. April 13 - Louisville, KY @ Zanzibar
Tue. April 14 - Nashville, TN @ The Mill at Cannery Ballroom 
Wed. April 15 - Columbus, OH @ A&R
Thu. April 16 - Ann Arbor, MI @ Blind Pig
Fri. April 17 - Toronto, ON @ Horseshoe Tavern
Sat. April 18 - Montreal, QC @ Théâtre Fairmount (with The Growlers, no album show)
Mon. April 20 - Boston, MA @ Sinclair
Tue. April 21 - New Haven, CT @ The Space
Wed. April 22 - Asbury Park, NJ @ Asbury Lanes
Thu. April 23 - Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts
Fri. April 24 - New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom (Double Vanity in full)
Sat. April 25 - New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom (Just Enough Hip To Be Woman in full)
Tue. April 28 - Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle (Double Vanity in full)
Wed. April 29 - Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle (Just Enough Hip To Be Woman in full)
Thu. May 14 - Boulder, CO @ Fox Theatre
Fri. May 15 - Albuquerque, NM @ Launchpad
Sat. May 16 - Tucson, AZ @ 191 Toole
Mon. May 18 - San Francisco, CA @ The Independent
Thu. May 21 - Pioneertown, CA @ Pappy & Harriet’s
Fri. May 22 - Los Angeles, CA @ Teragram Ballroom
Sat. May 23 - Santa Ana, CA @ Constellation Room
Sun. May 24 - Solana Beach, CA @ Belly Up
Fri. June 5 - Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios (Double Vanity in full)
Sat. June 6 - Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios (Just Enough Hip in full)
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“There’s five of me,” she said, falling back in her seat at the table. The rest of our group was talking nonstop in a flood of voices, indistinct from one another except that I was seated so close to her. She looked different, now appearing spacey. Dazed. Frightened. She took a drink of her beer and said it again, louder: “There’s five of me in the restroom.” At this, our table grew quiet. “I mean it. There’s five different versions of me in the restroom. Five whole people. All of them are different versions of me.” Suddenly our table erupted into laughter, queries and cheering. I sipped at my beer, studying her face as our group splintered off into various splintered conversations. “Didn’t you hear me?” she blurted. “There are five of me.” One thing about Megan that I always admired was her enunciation, the deliberate manner of speaking. It stuck, reeling me in like a fish. The sweat on her forehead and the redness of her face. “There’s five of me,” she said. “I can’t stay here.” Mesmerized, I stood and went to the bar to pay my tab, assuming we should leave. When I got back to our table, I was surprised to find there was a whole round of fresh beers set down. “What are you doing?” Megan asked me. I don’t know, I told her, gesturing at the fresh round of beers. She gripped my elbow and shoulder, digging both hands into me. “Don’t go.” Confused, I promised I wouldn’t leave, and so went back to the bar and opened a new tab. “There’s five of me in the women’s restroom,” Megan repeated as I walked away. While pouring a fresh beer, my eyes ventured from the bartender to the women’s room door, which had been left ajar, and to the visible portion of the sink and mirror. For just a fraction of a moment, I could see another person in there, somebody who looked exactly like Megan, right down to the mint green pleated halter top, right down to the sharp black bangs pasted to her forehead, and the solid amber of her sparkling eyes in the mirror, staring back at me as a second Megan came into view, also watching me, who closed the door on the restroom full of Megans.

person / @jessaraymuse
things / @corpseonpumpkin
32
A terrifying sound from the hall. My gaze falls long and drones with it, growing haltingly slow like a dying battery-powered radio, warped and distorting. The sound slows to a halt in the blur of shadowy hallway light, until all is quiet, and I can once more focus on what I see in it. Goddamned hospital waiting rooms. The massacre of valuable time. If I had any practical sense I’d be somewhere else, but I can’t seem to remove myself for too long from this uncomfortable vinyl chair. Even the coffee machine is out of sight from this room, and that hallway my twin sister disappeared into. The gulfs of silence emanating from the empty hallway leading to wherever she is trapped unconscious on a table, leaden weight under the close personal scrutiny of total strangers. When the door swings open it makes such an awful sound, becoming more intolerable by whomever bursts out from it, some person or other smeared in pasty light and out-of-focus horror, not looking at me, not knowing who I am. I’m waiting for somebody to look at me and know what I need to hear. But I can’t focus my eyes. The sound of that door opening, and the absence of my twin sister, who I need to see emerging from within the damp corridors beyond. The need is bad, as bad as these vinyl chairs. Are you dead, I ask her, in my head. But she is put to sleep with anesthesia, and she can’t answer.

person / @floofie
things / @corpseonpumpkin
40
Whole stalks of wheat crunched underfoot as I walked toward the center of a vast circle, scribbling notes on a pad of paper. Against the constant barking of dead wheat, the scratching of pen to paper served to call attention to the void apparent in this lonely, otherworldly silence. It was incredible. The information I was given on the phone had been accurate — a measured geometric clearing had been tamped down, and no one knew why, or how. A woman with her hair piled under a wide-brimmed hat stood not far from me and called, “Are you from the newspaper?” I nodded. With the pen still moving, my stunned hand withered from the page, sketching awed silence into the wind. I grimaced at the three jagged question marks scribbled there. The woman opened her arms, as if for a hug, dreamily walking backward and further away from me as she did so. “Well,” she said. “What’s your take?” I had to admit my tongue was tied. “All of this happened in one night.” She said it with a sharp snap of her fingers. The point hit home. “This is the first, leading north. The diameter of each one is perfect, and as we walk, you’ll also note that each consecutive circle is larger by exactly five feet. In all, there are five circles.” I searched her face for an explanation, but instead, an odd expectation in her own expression signaled she was reading my face for some semblance of the same. “So what do you think about it,” she asked. I could only, lamely, shrug my shoulders. In this, she did sense an answer of some kind, but not the one she wanted. Still walking backwards, the crunching of the destroyed crops prickled the crisp, still air. “Hell of an article, you got there,” she smirked. Who was she? As I was about to ask, she turned away, changing direction, and disappeared into a narrow corridor tamped in the wheat leading to the next in this series of mysterious circles. I closed my pad of paper, and followed her lead.

person / @wenspeakinglove
things / @corpseonpumpkin
35
Lamplight crept around my grandfather’s chair in the ominous form of a hazy yellow aura, at its brightest in the soft glow hovering just above the shiny mask of skin stretched over his scalp like a withered glow-in-the-dark bathing cap. Head down, arms limp, and palms curled upward on his knees, it was impossible to tell if he was still breathing. Ever since I returned from a year up north, he’s behaved as if I’d been away on the moon. Slumped forward, not moving. He does this each time I’m getting back to the house, pretending to be dead — it could be the real thing any of these nights, so I’m forced to take it seriously every time. Once, it fooled me to the point where I’d telephoned for help. Grandfather can slow his pulse, a trick he learned as an underwater technician when he was my age. It’s just him and I at the house now that my twin sister is gone. I miss my sister more than anything, and grandfather has made it clear he feels the same way, to the bold extent that I’m not to be considered a suitable remainder. He won’t use my real name, instead referring to me as “Blood Martha.” This poorly expressed reference to what he perceives as my grasping familial connection to sister Martha requires an effort to look past. It’s only slightly different than what he used to call me growing up . . . “Martha Sampled.” He’s always regarded me as a carbon copy, not a separate person. A lesser form of biological add-on. Now, snapping out of this fond memory of my sister’s influence over him, I stepped through the gloom and into the dimly lit interior of my grandfather’s study and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m home,” I said. For a long moment, grandfather’s body did not move. Bearing much patience on my part, ultimately there came the low hiss of his letting out a phenomenally held breath. Even at his age, he had amazing tenacity. “Of course you are,” he said.

person / @melancholic_model
things / @corpseonpumpkin
38
I used to be pen pals with someone across the hall. It began when I’d mistakenly received some of her mail in my lockbox. Not to intrude upon a neighbor’s personal space, I’d opted against delivering the misdirected letters by hand, in favor of repackaging the errant mail with a short note of explanation and postmarking it back to her at the correct address just across the hall from my door. In kind, she replied also by post, hand-sketching an image of what I presumed to be a facsimile of her, hugging the lost-and-found pieces of rediscovered mail over the postcard’s glossy landscape a barren moon surface. Christmas had been just around the corner, and so we’d sent each other small gifts. Our notes and trinkets gradually expanded toward longer and more conversational letters, continuing on for quite a stretch — all the while our schedules were so polarized we never actually met in person. When I moved out of the building, she’d been away on vacation, so we hadn’t said goodbye any closer than we’d said hello, but remained in contact for a few years after that as well. Though it would not be quite the same after we were no longer neighbors. As time passed, our correspondence slowed; the exchanges became less animated, more trivial, and finally – I could not even recall at what point — it trickled to nothing, like a tiny stream in the woods that one day disappeared. Upon infrequent occasions lately when I pass my old building, these thoughts come to me almost like a cool breeze, and I stop for a moment to look up at what used to be my window. How many lives a building knows, and how many people we grow into and out of, is a message written on letters sent not to us but to subconscious dimensions of physical being we might never recognize. Except for the cool breeze — I’ve felt that.

person / @dirtysynth
things / @corpseonpumpkin
30
The loneliness gets to me. It’s the loneliness that makes going forward feel like cascading backward. This is what I tried to explain to my therapist. And all the above is what I just described to my bartender, at the bar halfway between my apartment and the therapist’s office. I’ve come here the past two times I was supposed to be at a session instead. Not on purpose, but who knows how a day will turn out? The bartender is older, reflecting an easy and timeless wisdom that is beyond the perimeter of my own experience, and yet she also reminds me of an English teacher I had in high school. The teacher used to mark up my papers with a red pen, scribbling, “I expected more from you,” and other things like that — her way of encouraging students to reach their full potential. In a way, I think that’s what my therapist would like to impart as well, the way she sets her coffee cup down while I’m talking and sighs until I stop mid-sentence and ask, what? She’ll say, “It’s nothing, only I thought we’d broken this wall down before, and quite naturally I expected a different you.” In describing these things to the bartender (the one who reminds me of the English teacher), I suddenly stopped when I could see she meant to interject, and asked, what? And the bartender said, “It’s nothing, only I thought we discussed this before. I’ve explained to you I’m not your therapist, and if you need to talk to HER, you should actually go to your SCHEDULED meetings with HER instead of coming HERE.” True. And lately it seems everyone I know is more “together” — again, it’s the lonesomeness of being the only one around me who doesn’t have a tighter grip, that I wished I could be like that, too. Assuming a new self-assurance, I ordered another drink and said, make it a double this time. The bartender asked me what time my next appointment was for, and I said it would have ended just about now, I think, if I had gone. She put her shot glass down, poured me a new drink, and sighed. “Excuse me,” she said, “I have to go and call my son.” As she walked away, I smiled, pulling the drink toward me with an accepting nod. I know she doesn’t have any son.

Yours,
JARET.
11
The glowing x-rays pinned up in front of the light described a troubled tale. And if my initial estimations were exerted and exasperated, those of my physician — who’d had time to absorb the images before showing me — were nearly doubly so. I winced, hugging my belly against the unmistakable x-ray outline of a splayed human hand at the center of my stomach. How did it get there? “I should think you’d be the one to tell me,” the physician said. Me? All I know is I woke up this morning in such a frightful pain I could hardly move. Now here, and now this x-ray, showing a severed hand in my stomach. “Not severed,” the physician corrected. “There is no indication the hand is severed.” But if that is true, then where is the body? “Perhaps it is you,” she said. “Perhaps you are the body. You would not be the first to develop a third hand, of course — medical history details sporadic, if distanced, such cases. What is rather different with you, and THIS hand, is its nature and location. As one could not under normal circumstances expect to develop a new limb as this stage of their life, at your age, and especially not from inside the stomach, of all places, where hands do not and cannot suitably grow. At any rate, certainly not overnight.” So what am I to do about this? I can’t very well leave the hand floating in my stomach, I could die. Suppose a proximate organ is threatened, or if the hand continues to grow an arm. What then? A hand alone is bad enough, but where is there room in the stomach, or anywhere else for that matter, inside the human body, for another arm? I could die. My physician fervently nodded, apparently agreeing with my unpolished examination of the situation. She lifted her shoulders, and shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

person / @_rant_
things / @corpseonpumpkin

From 35mm film shot in Tulsa; hand-developed by @danfickle at his office in Portland.

#filmallover #analogphotography #filmphotograph #thedaily35mm #grainisgood #ourcinematic
36
Towering over the field from the top of a round bundle of hay, she simmered in the breeze. She took a moment to hear me out, then another to let the wind howl. “Well,” she finally said. “I just don’t believe you. How about that?” She was leaning on a pitchfork with one hand on her hip. I liked that she looked so mysterious. At any moment, she would figure this whole thing out, and the day could resume. Against the backdrop of the bright sun, much of her form was a shadow, but from what I could see of her face, she narrowed her eyes into pinpoints. Whether from squinting or disappointment, I could not tell. I cleared my throat to express humility, repeating my sad and strange tale of hopelessly losing my way amongst the hay bales. The extra silence in the world felt as hard as her glare. “And I told you,” she said. “I don’t believe that for a moment.” I didn’t know what else to say. In every direction, it was nothing but wired-up bales. With a powerful enough breeze, they could all rumble away, charging across the field. On each one stood a different person, all of them bearing pitchforks. I couldn’t understand any of it. The one speaking to me reached for her back pocket, pulled something out, and tossed it down. I lunged to catch it as if she’d thrown a baby from a rooftop, and if I failed to catch it, this would all be worse. It was just a gardening trowel. I didn’t understand. What am I to do with this? I asked. “Really, Jaret?” It was not so harshly said, and that relieved me, though the others were chuckling to themselves in the grave auditorium of the field. For the moment, whatever it was I couldn’t understand would have to be. The sound of their amusements was like a sweet blanket, carried on the sigh of the wind. It rustled stray fragments of the rolled-up hay and carried along in the distance.

person / @_rant_
things / @corpseonpumpkin

From 35mm film shot in Tulsa; hand-developed by @danfickle at his office in Portland.

#analogphotography #filmphotograph #35mmphoto #filmallover #grainisgood #filmphotos #thesearethedaysofourlives
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