“You know when you’re in jail for killing someone and you get a tear tattoo under your eye? That’s what these are.”

“Well, mine are one tear per hundred people.”

The weekend brought me the most wonderfully fun shoot, with Charon leaping on tables in fantastic costumes (American murderess, broken doll, tough clown and lace lady snake charmer) and me clip clopping in new shoes around her amazing Church of Fashion headquarters in Lincoln Heights. The house is so great I think I could take pictures every day there for a year and still find something new.

She’s starting life-drawing sessions there, amongst other endeavours.

Dodging the FCC, etc, courtesy of Little Radio.

How to Start Your Own Pirate Radio Station

It includes everything from the equipment companies to avoid, how to pick your frequency, legal issues and the fact that apparently in California there’s a law that states no vehicle without a driver may exceed 60 miles per hour. Nice.

I haven’t made it to Little Radio Summer Camp yet this year. I have no idea what’s up with that.

Outtakes from Sophia’s headshot shoot on Saturday, in between Useless Keys at Spaceland in the early hours of the morning and Fleet Foxes at The Echo in the evening.

The new red hair is fun to photograph.

(For Prefix)

After Fleet Foxes toured with Blitzen Trapper Erik told me that I should see them because they would make me melt, and they did (and not just because The Echo was entirely overcrowded, either.)

If you need melting too, you can download an MP3 of their song He Doesn’t Know Why direct from Subpop for free. That makes this my official most useful Countessian post ever.

PS — I’m on lastfm now. last.fm/user/countessofmaybe. Be my friend.

(Rancho Bernardo Inn, San Diego)

I’m sometimes a travel writer, which is lovely. You get paid to go to luxurious places and treated fantastically.

Sometimes you feel like you have two completely different lives, though, because travel writing pays very little. When you come home from your top-notch spa-resort holiday and realise you don’t have enough money to get your broken shoes fixed, it feels a bit confusing.

It’s a nice problem to have, of course.

MALIBU, AGES AGO: When you find a place so unlike home that it amazes you know end and you try as hard as you can to imagine ever being unhappy there but can’t because when you’re there it seems impossible for anything so low as sadness to exist, don’t go back years later on the anniversary of your break up from the boy who took you there in the first place.

Particularly, don’t go back with the friend that he dated before you and never got over.

Ouch.

However, if you are silly enough to do all that, following it up by getting plastered at a Circle Jerks show in Redondo Beach should sort you out.

A tertulia is “a kind of literary salon, only more fun” in Spain and Latin America, said the invitation from Laura.

“Our cheap domestic knockoff is really just an excuse to gather some of our most fascinating creative pals for conversation, confabulation, imbibification and — we dare to hope — a few performed works from the troubadours, jesters, songsmiths and assorted scribblers we count among us.”

Sometimes Downtown goes magical. I’m not kidding. Narrow brick alleys with fairylights balance out 90-degree heat beautifully. Cocktails and good company on beat-up corner couches help.

(The drink to which the title refers is the Orange Blush, pictured below. We wanted mojitos; they had no more mint. We requested a sweet-yet-refreshing mystery cocktail; the bartender was ingenious.)

Bottleneck. STUCK!

(I was very young and ecstatic when I took this. We drank the bottle of Black Label first, then he bought me funny-looking flowers at 2am in an all-night supermarket. I said I didn’t want them, but then photographed them endlessly anyway.)

From the “I’ve never heard them; are they good? Oh! Good God! They’re great!” impromptu photo-pit dance party at Mess with Texas during SXSW to the “I slept in a swimming pool last night but I’m still jumping up and down with glee when Islands play” Coachella glory, I think I love Islands.

It was lovely to finally see them at their own show, even though the age of the audience made me feel really old and I’d somehow (quite mysteriously; suggestions on a postcard or the back of an envelope to the usual coordinates, please) dried out my contact lenses so much that taking pictures was physically painful.

Also, they reminded me that I do like music and I do like taking pictures and I do like my friends and I do think white shoes with black jeans are a trend I can appreciate. Thank you, Islands.

(For Prefix, which has fancy new watermarks that I quite enjoy.)