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Jo Gabriel is originally from New York. Is an animal rights activist. Horror and Film Noir Aficionado. Artist and poet. She is of Ukrainian, Turkish and German heritage. Her lineage is linked to the European gypsies, and she feels that this is where she gets her highly intuitive sensibilities. She is currently learning how to play the Accordion. She has six cats and a cauldron. Loves all things metaphysical, supernatural, Pagan and all things ancient that call out of the "Old Ways" Her favorite movies are Robert Wise's The Haunting, Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and Harold and Maude.Sam Fuller's The Naked Kiss and Casablanca.Jo drives a Volvo and wishes Boris Karloff had been her Grandfather. She considers Coffee the nectar of the Gods and loves it when it rains really hard.
Quotes:
"To be made evident, truth must be sought for; for of itself it is slow to appear, and between ourselves and god the obstacles are so many." -George Sands "Men are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them." -The Greek philosopher Epictetus "The farther behind I leave the past the closer I am to forging my own character." -Isabelle Eberhardt "I am myself heaven and hell." -Rubyat "You remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones." -Plato "The mind is its own place and in it it can make a heaven its hell and hell its heaven." -Milton-Paradise Lost "We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep." -Prospero from Shakespeare's the Tempest. "Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers 'grow, grow.'" -Talmud "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." -Oscar Wilde "Life shrinks and expands in proportion to ones courage." -Anais Nin "Art is the lie that shows us the truth."-Picasso "A daydreamer is prepared for most things."-Joyce Carol Oates "How helpless we are like netted birds, when we are caught by desire."-Belva Plain "Catholicism and Taboo made sex good."-Luis Bunuel "Is it a man dreaming he is a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he is a man."-ancient proverb "The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances:if there is any reaction, both are transformed."-C.G.Jung "I shut my eyes in order to see."- Paul Gauguin "No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently."-Agnes DeMille "Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action."-Stendhal. "The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."-Francis Bacon "What shakes the eye, but the invisible."-Theodore Roethke "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious."-Albert Einstein "He who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song bird in a cage."-Kahlil Gibran "The privilege of absurdity to which no living creature is subject but man only."-Thomas Hobbes-Leviathan "And kill me again, or take me as i am for i shall not change."-Marquis De Sade "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."-Ralph Waldo Emerson "Do not weep, do not wax indignant...understand."-Spinoza "To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying amen to what the world tells you you ought to to prefer is to have kept your soul alive."-Robert Louis Stevenson "The world of reality has its limits. The world of the imagination is boundless."-Jean Jaques Rousseau "All sanity depends on this; that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh."-Doris Lessing "All human life is sunk deep in untruth."-Nietzsche "A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness."-Jean Genet " The light of reason sometimes gives birth to monsters."- "What is to give light is to endure burning."-Viktor Frankl "Better than a hundred years lived in ignorance without contemplation; is one single day lived in wisdom and in deep concentration."-DHAMMAPADA "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."-Henry David Thoreau "All the knowledge i possess everyone else can aquire, but my heart is all my own."-Goethe "What you can do or think you can do, begin it.For boldness has magic,power and genius in it."-Goethe "Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which itself never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind, and is as various as nature itself."-Goethe "Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night."-Rainer Maria Rilke "What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?"-Bertolt Brecht "Revolution doesn’t have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out."-Joseph Campbell, Man and Myth, "The Necessity of Rites"
Some of my favorite literature:
JOHN FOWLES - THE MAGUS
I love the mysterious and the macabre. But I am shaken by random violence and inherent mindless evil in a narrative. I am rather repulsed by brutality for violence sake unless there is a parable in there somewhere. A cautionary tale or fable. The human mind is a battleground for these kinds of ideas, but I think we have to be very careful when telling their story. We need the balance of Darkness and it's companion Light, but I dare not dwell in the shadows for too long, lest it leave a stain on our psyche. Like Rubyat said "I am myself Heaven and Hell" Or Milton's Paradise Lost " the mind is it's own place and in it, it can make a heaven it's hell and a hell it's heaven"...I love Quotes I also write poetry..... I love referential dialogue. I always speak in terms of quoting or citing great characters from film or fiction. It accompanies me in every conversation. Like if I am particularly in a spin about a situation I will declare. "It's a mad house" like Taylor yell's out in Planet of The Apes. I have a lot of voices and characters in my repertoire I love puppets, marionettes...and odd toys. I use runes and the Tarot..but I stay far away from Ouija boards. I have several tattoos and secretly desire to paint myself with a PAYA the Samoan body suit from rib cage to knees and face. Which is a right of passage. Or at least a Maori face mask. They are so beautifully primal. I am fascinated by obscure little stories about people or places. Fantastical events or interesting mythos. Like Davinci speaking of the wings brushing against his mouth as if being visited by a divine presence. Or how Hailey's Comet appeared both the day Mark Twain was born and the day he died. and I am a conspiracy theorist. I believe the first Moon landing by the U.S. was an elaborate hoax. And I name everything. And every one of my cats has 10 nicknames that unfold as I grow to meet their personalities. And some of them have their own little songs as well... I sing to them constantly... I think about potential song titles and write them down. I have lists and lists of them. And I collect interesting words and concepts like Radio Telethesis- the empathetic connection with the spirit world to sense a ghost's sadness. Polymorphosis Psychomantiums- Victorian denizens of the supernatural set up mirrored rooms as portals to summon the dead to come through. Homonculus, Zeitgeist, Ubiquitous, Miasma, Diaspora, Photinus Ignitus-the secret rituals of fireflies. Sturm Und Drang, the German literary movement meaning storm and stress.Anima Sola - the true inner self and The Hysterical Arch- in which some madness manifests itself by way of people arching their back this way. Salvador Dali used it in his paintings. Or Dr. Van Tassle's Integritron- channeled by aliens to him in the California desert. Could take 10-15 years off your life if you entered it. I love this stuff. And Stichomancy- which I have been practicing for years and never knew that it was an actual craft. I long for deliverance from the ordinary like Stendahl's experience with his viewing of the Carravagio which led to The Stendahl Syndrome. "My head thrown back I let my gaze dwell on the ceiling, underwent the profoundest experience of ecstasy I have ever encountered. I had attained that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion" I long for those rare moments when I shiver with the rush of altered consciousness. In an ephemeral blast of time's breath, it's like the universe reveals itself and there is a mutual recognition of all things. But as quick as it manifests it slams shut it's window, only leaving the essence like some intoxicating perfume that remains after someone has left the room.
ON BEING A NEW YORKER: I love being a New Yorker. I feel like I am a New Yorker more than an American, especially these days.( I have a lot to say about the current political climate here but I would rather hold off for now.) We New Yorkers are a very unique breed of people. We are diverse and ubiquitous in our collection of identities. We are honest and weathered, and we unite when we are most vulnerable, which is a contradiction to the misconception that we are anonymous and disconnected and apathetic with each other. I think we energize each other by mere co existence, like a collectively conscious organism, like that of an ant colony. We work together, though it seems there is no intimacy. I will always be proud of my beloved New York. It is an alive place. Dreams can breath freely there with no constraints. New York is its own Country...
ON LIVING IN WISCONSIN: Living in the Heartland of America is like taking a long exhale. As compared to the constant shiver that New York evokes in me. Here I am isolated and open to contemplation. I wrote both THE AMBER SESSIONS and THE LAST DRIVE IN here. Because of the 'lost' inspiration that it has ignited in me. I live on Starkweather Creek. And in the summer the dragonflies are as abundant as taxi cabs in Manhattan. And the cotton wood flows in the spring like a flurry of non melting snow. James Marsh's film WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP- kind of sums up the under current of dreamy otherness and alienation that sometimes permeates the atmosphere here.
ON MY 4-TRACK: Analogue recordings: This is a very organic and alchemic ritual for me. Even amidst all the natural tape hiss and noise. I don't hear it. I like its rawness and its attitude. I never know what will emerge ahead of time. It's like divination, like conjuring the elementals. The act of looking and seeing and then re-seeing to get to the truth about the work is absent. I think the first look is the purest, the most honest. There is incredible mystery and passion on that level. It's an intimate way of meeting your music in the mirror. It is naked and at times even ugly or dirty in its revelation.( in the messy sense not meaning the immoral kind of dirty).Because it isn't manufactured or pristine in it's perfection unless it wants to be. You don't have a hand in controlling the outcome. It brings you closer to the essence of what first emerges as the naked child just as we are giving birth. Like the blank rune " The Unknowable " it is so potent with its possibility. Before we dress it up in its self-consciousness and in need of exhumation. I love working this way. |
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