moar funny pictures
Also I’m in Mexico City for a few days and it’s great and Mexico is great and I’m terrible at updating this blog but it’s because I’m having a ball all over the place.
Can you believe this blog didn’t have a tag for ‘ideas about cats’ before this? What kind of cat lady am I. Yeesh. As you can see, Huxley is enjoying Mexico as much as I am.
I say, eh, sorry. I wanted to flood you with gorgeous pictures then my camera broke. I wanted to flood you with gorgeous descriptions then my internal voice broke.
Solution: Come visit.
Off to eat more churros, ta ta.
Ok, wait, come back. Day of the Dead photos will be up next week when I pull them off a friend’s camera.
Shameless plug: This Sat, Nov 21st, is my birthday!
Sorry for the silence. It’s kind of nice to ignore the internet, every now and again.
Stories friends, stories. But it’s all been on hold while I bounced around looking for an apartment. There are some shoddy apartments out there, but this, this is not one of them. I have an amazing place to live.
Leaving my temporary crash pad at Sara’s was a little sad, she kept feeding me great food and hanging out with me, but it’s exciting to have a place where I know I will be for more than a few days.
The cat, poor poor Hux, agrees. This is like, his 6th place in three weeks or something. Yeesh.
More soon. Bedy by for now.
VIVA!
More details shortly. I leave the first weekish of October, with plans to spend a month at the beach in Cabo and then head inland to the artist hangout of San Miguel de Allende. It’s going to be me and Huxley the cat.
So excited. More soon.
It’s Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s annual Time Based Arts festival again, and I’m blogging for what I think is my 5th year. As far as contemporary art is concerned, PICA effectively raised me. They started comping tickets out to Kirsten before I even graduated college, and have given me a free pass almost ever since in exchange for blogging. This year, they took over an old school as the visual arts and late night show venue, and it’s gorgeous.
Here’s my first blog on the experimental film Crock, which I warn you, is a bit vulgar.
iPhone in hand, I’ve been taking some pictures. Here’s two and a video, more soon.
The Sugar Shack, created with on site materials found in the closed school.
Local artist Ethan Rose's synchronized music boxes
In Newsweek, a story of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, asked by Czar Nicholas II to be the Russian royal photographer from 1907-1915. He traveled by custom dark room train, shooting on glass plates in 3 filters (R,G,B) to create the appearance of full color photographs. I love the gauzy look it gives these images.
The only glass plate negative I’ve seen was a magnificent one. My dad is Chilean, so on his 50th birthday we returned to his ranch home in the lake district, coming back to a country he hadn’t seen since he was 15. One of the places we visited was the farm home of my aunt’s boyfriend, a man she’d left behind who apparently never got over her. He and his wife had a rotting but beautiful old Victorian home in the country, with a barn full of piglets that my teenage self couldn’t get enough of. At night they let the single iron stove heater die out, so my other clear memory is of piling under dozens of blankets against the cold–an inverted princess and the pea.
Hanging around the living room one night, the farmer pulled out a box of little treasures that a missionary from England had left at his country church long ago. Tucked in with letters and idols was a perfect glass negative of the Titanic leaving port. Can you imagine?
The dark marks showed the Titanic in the first moments of it’s movement away from the dock. It wasn’t chipped or faded at all, about the size of a playing card and the thickness of a coaster, kept perfect by a man who traveled to rural Chile from England, and then passed around by the church caretakers. When we asked what he would do with it, he said it would always belong to the church, and someone would take care of it after him.
Russian photo link via @mikebarish, who has lots of good travel tweets.
Blog silence lately is due to a life examination. I’ve realized the following in the last 3 weeks:
We’ll see where these things lead. Big developments all around.
Here are a few music videos from the 60s in France showing stylish people riding bikes.
Alex Marco, The Bike. Via BikeSnobNYC. It looks like those cool Peugeot checkerboard jerseys were only made from 1963 to the 80s. Too bad.
Shelia, l’ecole est finie (school is out)
Bonus: This doesn’t involve bikes, but it’s a strange, strange song:
I’ve been having a terrible time at work lately–because everyone is on vacation, I’m having to do all sorts of jobs, learning to do them and then doing them in rushed time. One thing is combining data across four different spreadsheets that differ in name and are riddled with errors. It’s something I’ve done all day today and will do all day tomorrow. My writing, my work I love, has all been put off.
In an attempt at not freaking out, or to stave off the collapsing feeling inside my head, I’ve been listening to podcasts. Radio Lab on WNYC is a beautiful show that explores everyday things, talking to experts in layman’s terms, yakking with my favorite neurologist Oliver Saks (read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, read it), that sort of thing. And then, when people react to their show by creating something else of beauty, they share it. Like this:
Just read about her project, she’s hilarious. She’ll send you a coconut, a sailor hat, a Big Gulp full of stuff from afar… I can’t sail the world, but I sure would like to, so I’ll support it. Double points for her cool glasses.
I pledged $26.71, because I wanted to pledge over $25 and I liked the way those numbers mirror each other.
What should my spirit animal be though? Hmm.
Thanks, Kirsten, for the link.
Image via Bike Portland
According to Bike Portland, a local cargo bike builder Tom LaBonty has built this to carry his kid to school (and many other cool rigs, check them out at that link).
For non-Oregonians, the New Carissa is a famous ship here that crashed on the Oregon coast in 1999, spilled a bunch of oil, and stuck in the sand as a nuisance/tourist attraction. When I first moved here in 2001 and introduced myself, people without fail made some joke about me crashing into Oregon. When they finally started dismantling the remaining piece of the ship in 2008, I got a whole new round of jokes and a front page newspaper headline: New Carissa, Manageable or Madness? That one is still on my fridge.
As I commented on that photo, it’s good to see another (cleaner) form of transport representin’ my name.
A celebratory balloon launch found on the page of artist/fun maker Dickbird. Look at his site.
So, how to celebrate fall? Launch a squirrel? And a bunch of nuts, separately?
Outstanding in the Field is a group that travels the USA all summer by bus throwing lavish, farm fresh dinners in stunning locations. The dinners begin with a tour of the farm. A table for 60 in a vineyard, for 200 on a beach…they have a beautiful idea here. Sign up for the newsletter to catch early notice of next year’s dinners.
And who wants to make grilled pizza with me?
Images from their blog, which is pure eye candy for foodies.
My friend sent this, and for the first 4 lines I thought I was going to hate it. From the New Yorker. Enjoy.
If a Clown
by Stephen Dunn
If a clown came out of the woods,
a standard-looking clown with oversized
polka-dot clothes, floppy shoes,
a red, bulbous nose, and you saw him
on the edge of your property, Read the rest of this entry »
Made by a friend of my coworker. Pretty funny stuff. If you want to see some obnoxious fixie videos, you tube it or look at Prolly. Oh here, I’ll do it for you, Bootleg Sessions.
Image: Mickipedia
Via @FeliciaDay
“Visitors are requested not to break down doors in search of liquor, even when authorized to do so by the host and hostess … Weekend guests are respectfully notified that the invitation to stay over Monday issued by the host-hostess during the small hours of Sunday morning must not be taken seriously.”
Note it says the small hours of Sunday–quite the party people! Found in an article on The Seven Vices of Highly Creative People on Salon.
Image: jonbarad
