Each of their qualities

Image: I can't live without a poni

What I See - Vanessa

Unlike most women -- unlike most human beings -- this Vanessa seems enormously confident about the reach and potency of her personal charms. All of them want me, she sings in her knowing voice, and they come to me at night/ all of them love me/ they want to treat me right. Lucky girl you think. Or not. This flickering gothic-framed torch song also has a resigned piano and violins that sound like they've played funerals. It has precocious bitterness like a mid-October frost and a knowledge that once assumed can't be sloughed (I can tell you friend/ About each of their qualities -- lines that, incidentally, makes me irrationally sad). In its terrible ken are men who prey like wasps and tigers and demons (not to mention flowers that settle like a lead shawl around the neck), who even when they don't have names always have bodies. It's a pretty song and one that distrusts deeply -- even baiting misandry.

Vanessa's Myspace.

Let This Body Go - Death Songs

Death Songs is a sloppy Shaky Hands sideproject of Delffs brothers, bongos, tambourines, thigh slaps, trumpets that unravel like yarn, harmonies stretched like taffy. The players' dayjob requires tight, scrappy, spirited numbers, so Death Songs (as so many extracurricular bands) is more of a shoes-off-hair-down affair. "Let This Body Go" isn't a shambles, but it's a little shambolic and, despite its trad verse-chorus edifice and a legible melody, is vaguely improvisational, holding itself loosely together until sort of falling apart at the end in horn sputters and vocal wails. Which makes sense for a song that celebrates the shuffling off of this mortal coil.

Death Songs' Myspace

Food, etc:

So I've been searching high and low for a really good fruit cobbler recipe and this past weekend I made something close to perfection (from the current Fine Cooking magazine). I used very ripe nectarines and strawberries and it was extremely yum -- though I think I'll substitute blueberries for the strawberries once they're in season.

If you haven't already, check out more of Niki Kelce's (above) lovely ink and colorwash dreamscapes at her Flickr page.