"About twenty-five years ago, I made an offhand and somewhat uncharitable remark about the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There was no malice intended, it was just the sort of obnoxious thing I would say back then to piss people off. I was a troublemaker, a shit-stirrer, feeling most at ease in the role of a societal irritant. Perhaps it’s an Australian trait among people of my generation, I don’t know, but that comment has followed me around for the last quarter-century. But the most interesting aspect of all this is not what I said about the Chili Peppers, but rather the response from Flea, their bass player. On Facebook, Flea expressed how hurt he felt by my remark, but went on to say, in great detail, that he loved my music regardless. He wrote a profoundly generous and open-hearted love letter to Nick Cave. I remember being genuinely moved by his words and thinking what a classy guy Flea was, and feeling on some subterranean level that I was unable to fully grasp at that point in my life, that Flea was a human being of an entirely different calibre, indeed, of a higher order.

Over the years, I would run into Flea at music festivals where both our bands were performing and see him backstage when we played in Los Angeles. Although we didn’t become close friends, my encounters with him were always pleasant – there was a presence to Flea that felt genuine and oddly affecting. On the Push the Sky Away tour, we asked Flea if he could assemble a children’s choir, from the Silverlake Conservatory of Music he founded, to accompany the Bad Seeds at the Coachella Festival. When Warren and I were on the Carnage tour, we asked Flea to join us and play the song ‘We No Who U R’. Watching Warren and Flea perform together with such heart and mutual regard was a glorious sight.

Last week, Flea sent me a song and asked if I’d like to add some vocals. It was for a “trumpet record” that he is making. It is not for me to divulge what the song was, only that it is a song I cherish more than most, with arguably the greatest lyric ever written, a song of such esteem that I would never have dared to sing it had Flea not asked me to. I went into the studio on Wednesday and recorded my vocals. The track emerged as a beautiful conversation between Flea’s trumpet and my voice, filled with yearning and love, the song transcending its individual parts and becoming a slowly evolving cosmic dance, in the form of a reconciliation and an apology.

My friend, the artist Thomas Houseago, recounted a story involving Flea. A couple of years ago, Flea, his daughter, Thomas, and a guide were hiking through the backcountry of Yosemite. They had been hiking for five days and were walking along a densely forested trail when a bear appeared on the path before them. Everybody froze. The bear was about ten feet away from them. It was a large black bear with a reddish hue. Thomas and the guide gripped their tent poles, perhaps to defend themselves in case the bear attacked. Flea, however, stepped forward, stood before the bear, and spoke to it. He acknowledged they were visitors in the bear’s territory, expressed his love for the bear, and requested permission to continue along the trail. The bear stepped off the path and allowed them to pass."

Nick Cave

This is me and Patricia. We are performing as King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival this year. I make my costumes, and you are looking at an unbelievable amount of my free time over the last few months.

Our theme is "heroes and villains" and our characters started the Spanish Inquisition, so our costuming is very Disney-villain inspired.

source: https://www.tumblr.com/pmamtrav...

A nearby apple orchard revealed their 2026 corn maze depicting Dolly Parton on Tuesday, hours before her death was announced. It's one of 20 Dolly-themed mazes around the country, all planned and designed months ago to be ready for the fall harvest season.
https://allseasonsorchard.com/pages...

source: https://www.shawlocal.com/northwes...

source: https://bsky.app/profile...

Work by Jennifer Nelson.

“My piece was inspired by Picasso's Guernica, a work that was his response to the Nazi's bombing of the Basque town. I thought there was a fitting parallel between these incidents about the high price paid by ordinary people when aggressive regimes try out new tactics of war, as well as a fitting juxtaposition of the darkness of living such an experience and the light we shone through it in our own resistance and care for one another. The patterns near Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s mouths are actually their last words in Morse code: ‘I’m not mad at you,’ and ‘Are you okay?’”

More seed art for the Minnesota state fair on similar themes at https://www.cropart.com/Resist....

Much more here:
W. E. B. Du Bois’ Hand-Drawn Infographics of African-American Life
https://publicdomainreview.org/collecti...

re: https://mltshp.com/p/1RT5B

got this shirt from @drurystephanie’s campaign a while back but never got the chance to show it off.

took a day off, spent the morning wandering across the university campus whilst clutching a breakfast bagel and slowly realizing it was becoming too warm for corduroy pants.

was not raised evangelical but was surrounded by that conservative-supply-side brand of christianity. i spent most of my teen years slowly trying to break free of it… so yeah, the shirt spoke to me. i don’t know if it’ll ever help me win an argument with family when they scowl at me for giving a person change but it’s worth rattling a cage or two.

Rename it yourself!

https://gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario

source: https://gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeonta...

re: https://mltshp.com/p/1RUY1

further down the nostalgia rabbit-hole, found an old international harvester cap, almost exactly like the umpteen harvester and deere caps my maternal grandfather had. for some reason i had to have it, even though it’s snowing flakes of desiccated foam innards everywhere.

Editor's comment from Milo's manuscript.

I used this as my Twitter banner for years.

https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem...

https://www.worknwomen.com/the-laug...

I would follow you anywhere, my Queen!

Rather than demolishing the old subway ticket office when the system was being rebuilt, it was raised up and the new tunnels built under it. The old St Enoch's railway station next to it wasn't so lucky: it was demolished and became a fairly terrible glass-walled shopping centre.

source: https://bsky.app/profile...

He's a VERY good boy!

source: https://roguetelemetry.tumblr.com/post...

RIP Dolly


source: https://bsky.app/profile...

A cinema here used to play the Rocky Horror every Friday night at midnight and 18/19 year old me and a couple of friends decided to go along, not even really understanding what it was all about. When we arrived we found half the cinema was dressed like the characters. They had umbrellas and they threw rice in the air (IYKYK) and yelled out dialogue at certain points along the way.

The crowd sang along and interacted with the film as if it was scripted. We we're blown away!

So months later we all decided to go again and this time we'd dress up too, which was a huge extroverted thing to do for this bunch of introverts. When we arrived, pretty impressed with our efforts, we discovered that nobody else had dressed up that night just us. Worst best night of our 18/19 year old lives thus far 😁

Vale Tim Curry and thanks for the shows

also could we not just have one day to mourn Dolly alone

Recently dug this back up from the bottom of my t-shirt drawer. It’s a good summer shirt.

my old supervisor messaged me this morning with this extremely targeted content

in her words, "I saw that and I was '....nick'"

purchase link (lots of great stuff from this shop!):
https://www.wonderfairhomeshop...