BOOKS OF THE SOUTHWEST LITERARY JOURNAL SINCE 1957

Independent feature western produced, written, and directed by Shiloh Richter (2005-2007).

After leaving teaching college literature, an accidental side trip in her twenties, for writing and directing, a passion she had been working on all along, Shiloh was living alone with gorgeous horses and her dogs on a 606 acre ranch in Southwest Texas miles away from anyone in the middle of everywhere and with that Texas independent spirit that anything could be done. Filming across Texas and New Mexico, the wonder of it all laid within--and on the cusp--from missions in San Antonio, Texas, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, El Paso and Mexico, Shiloh was unknowingly following the very path of Willa Cather's narrative Death Comes for the Archbishop (and born in Ohio where the North American journey begins coming from France) for a revelation that would come upon beginning to write to John Mayer three years later. Not taking a starring role despite following acting, but directing her father, a Methodist minister and singer, it was the coming together of seeing John on Red River St. in Austin and the girl from Texas who would fall in love with a boy in New York City, the very basis of Breakfast at Tiffany's into its own deeper story. The convergence this many years later happened that very year in 2010 when Shiloh visited Greenwich Village, right in Willa's neighborhood that she would discover is the actual setting of Breakfast at Tiffany's from Willa's writing, and where John would first play "A Face to Call Home" that December 2010, deeply hurt by the turn of the public so easily on a false accusation for power and control when he thought he had been loved for what he had given and created.

In a rage of narcissistic ownership, demand for the spotlight and story for herself, and jealousy, and covered by a good girl act easily sold, Taylor Swift plagiarized for Red the movie poster that Shiloh showed John online (still archived online and among other references) after Taylor first made the movie and marketing into her making fun of it and taking control of it in her "Mean" video, taken from a statement Shiloh had made about a personal happening written in her letters to John online. Taylor's forceful acts were also meant to punish Shiloh for writing to John and to stop it from further happening.

It is an intense narcissistic situation when someone wishes to keep you completely, deadly silent, lies, triangulates, projects, and scapegoats and demands the starring role in every replicated situation so that the victims won't be believed, and tries to cause professional failure, demanding ugliness, like hers, for a reaction for further headlines and victimization . . .

. . . and then there is believing in extraordinary beauty even when it takes many years of staying true to oneself and to others.

Just two days before the City Lights book manager was arrested for selling Ginsberg's exuberant freedom and existence manifesto Howl in San Francisco, Books of the Southwest literary journal was begun on the West Coast by the head librarian at the University of California at Los Angeles, the first issue coming out on June 1, 1957. It was the same summer Jerry Garcia got his first electric guitar and Phil Lesh graduated from high school. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published that September. The Americana road was opened and on fire. 

The first publisher having come from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and with friends such as Henry Miller and sensual food writer M.F.K. Fisher also there on the coast to break social boundaries, BSW was there at the beginnings of the '60s, the Grateful Dead, and the artistic culture reaching to the east coast.

The journal came to the current editor Shiloh Richter after forty years in print, in 1997, the year Allen Ginsberg passed and his long-time friend Bob Dylan played him "Desolation Row" the next evening, and this the same year John Mayer, who would form Dead and Company with members of the Grateful Dead, was starting out in Atlanta, Georgia, on his own, fervently bringing something very real.

Photo: Moonbeam in 2014 Stepping Out from Vincent Van Gogh's "The Café Terrance on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night" c. 1888

In 2015 while writing I was looking at the images of the Sistine Ceiling I noticed a pattern with god's hand pointing at the Moon. Looking at Michelangelo's prominent moon on the ceiling and knowing the feminine meaning of the Moon, I already knew from briefly looking at three panels that the particular arrangement of images towards this would continue a pattern already established, taking it most certainly across the ceiling and would reveal something intentionally planned by Michelangelo, something clearly audacious.  I wrote the news to John Mayer and Kanye, among others, on a private blog post writing here, that this master artist/Poet was about to reveal something immeasurable. The pattern I could see was too perfectly placed to not lead to the astonishingly prodigious. I knew it was pointing directly to the feminine and also the head on the body of the feminine, meaning Her Body, Her Chapel, Her Heavens and Sky, but I was also stunned to realize it was revealing the very miraculous Moment, the master Poet/Artist come for his prize and delivered directly to the next master Poet as well, embodied, meant to be, and beyond imagination, the purpose of my own Being I had always wondered at, and all of this with this finger pointing at the Moon in this very moment my white Bichon Frise Moonbeam had passed. I knew Michelangelo had planned something to be found in wonder and astonishment, the masterful art Trickster exuberantly in spirit pushing me on. The Moment had come. As Joseph Campbell wrote, "It is here, it is here, it is here."

In Coyote Weaves a Song:  A Mythological Song from the Beginning of Time, I decode Michelangelo's patterns of the Sistine Ceiling (a sky ready to fall or be hallowed in stupefied recognition) and in his other works, discovering that not only is his completed statement about the centrality of and the crux of civilization the feminine, further, the embodied feminine audaciously steps through transformation and prophecy of the female oracles and even through the Hebrew bible to the throne of both the sacred and the sublunary, necessarily broken open to each other by her very Being and to be experienced in the here and now in the flesh, and that this eloquent proclamation is also a literal wonderworking coming true, stepping from the art, and this having come in a line of world-transformative literature and art understood by the master artists back to Homer and beyond, intentionally meant to bring this primary revelation about to culture through art in explicitly real terms. How real is beyond imagination. As I followed the patterns, something I have been doing as a fascination and preoccupation in books since a child, as I worked my way back on the ceiling from above the high altar towards the front of the Chapel, it was at the entrance--a reference itself to the feminine in how we enter life and the sacred--that I realized the entire thing was about Jacob's prophecy that contains my name, a strange and wild divination I already knew contained my first and last name, birth date, birth year, place of birth, her parents' birth years, the number of the last two U.S. Presidents leading from the rise to awakening in the black, Kanye's and John Mayer's birth year, then to the demise of the old order, the words of Jesus precisely stating both my name and birth date, the American date of Independence, a date of the burst of Spring, and the name of the goddess Io in several different iterations, even as Asherah and Eve, and this of which there are direct references on the Sistine Ceiling in a telling revelation about the artist himself and his astounding lineage of virtuosic prognosticators--the brightest, consummate, and most gifted and insightful--and now even clairvoyant--the world has ever known. As I wrote I realized I was literally bringing myself into Being and conscious awareness which had been held in in so many, even uncanny, ways.  In the first three days of my life, for example, nurses at the metropolitan hospital, Bethesda Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, requested that I be photographed for a book, a baby care manual.  As a ten-month pregnancy, my mother told me, I already had hair and nails and violet eyes. For reasons I have only recently come to understand, my parents said no. On Michelangelo's ceiling, the Libyan Sibyl stepping down with her book above the high altar was compounded to me by the passing of my heart, my white Bichon Frise, just as the white dog referencing the Dog Star of Isis steps to the throne from the art into the Chapel.

In the works 'Until Shiloh Comes' Cosmic Flow Tapestry (2018), an art print, and in the works Coyote Weaves a Song:  A Mythological Song from the Beginning of Time (Volumes I & II, 2018), a magnificent flow is shown directly from the prehistoric in Paleolithic Old Europe from the South of France inside the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave through Song to the American West Coast in this very moment, having been culminating there since the 1950s and the beginnings of the Grateful Dead, and now to reach its zenith in recognition, the revelation of the universal and timeless labyrinth, a tremendous and extraordinarily timely rite in itself.  What is to be found at its thousands-of-years-old origin is a transformative rite into Being founded on the irrefutable coming into form of the eternal through the dual-embodied female--Being and Body, and this a rite through the eternal artistic and arriving in this moment.

In the deepest hall of Chauvet this recognition occurs at the return of the Super Shaman's world transformative flight to the "water's edge," after the "hunt,"--which in the Homeric epics is the brilliant transformation of symbols and from war to "place of peace"--the "Place" signified by the still and peaceful water, the Being, just as Form is to Land, the place of landing on the surface of Her eternal, where Form and Being coincide, and can go either way, a Crossing that appears to be birth or death. To enter into this cave in rite is to die of form and to reemerge as a Being who has seen and participated in the other side and knows its own Source. It is the flight of the shaman, the musician, the artist, the bard.

The Being who emerges has a profoundly different insight.  In the Shiloh Tapestry I write:

"The defining difference, it can be said, is this gratitude for the forms and the mystery of the 'dead' entering the shaman flight.  Thus, the actual shaman flight is the 'Grateful Dead.' There is an awareness that his/her form and Being is entering into a metamorphosis necessary for the alteration of the world of forms: her world of forms requires this true greatness to go between and return the transformation to the world of the 'living,' thereby sustaining in beauty the flow of the in-between."

This is a new time.

The Tapestry, then, unwoven and woven, is now being returned with all that it opens to the rightful leaders, the Grateful Dead, to Laërtes: Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia and all the members living and passed, and to the lineage of the Song and the new opening of the sacred flow that transforms in its wake in Dead & Company.

From the pages of My Love Affair with Moonbeam, a gallery of filming in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and at La Espiga, Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, Mexico, in an olive grove, at the time of the end of the Mayan calendar, 12.21.12.