Lovely doesn't begin to describe this...

www.pbs.org

French 19th Century Blue Opaline Snake Paperweight, Appraised on Antiques Roadshow July 2003

Oh, Sweet Frabjousness!

It's been an awesome day: I slept in! which is no easy feat for me as I've been working at what my friend Beth refers to as "sparrow fart" - an hour so early you can hear a sparrow fart! - for the last ten years. I thought sleeping in was a thing of the past... It was a quarter to ten when I rolled my ass out of bed for breakfast at Victor's Cafe with friends Ruby and Miya where we proceeded to feast on a mango pancake and sub cuban toast;) Then on to some random snow sculptures in the uptown neighborhood behind Lund's that Al and I found totally by accident last night on our way home from said Lund's.

Onward to the Open Book Center where we happened upon artists hanging the new show for RosaLux gallery - sweet pen and ink by a guy who's name escapes me at the moment; pencil on paper by the other guy who's name I never got. I must go back and see it all put together! Then right next door to Big Brain Comics (yes, I am a GEEK!) where I found the best illustration magazine called Hi-Fructose and the latest installment of Terry Moore's Echo.

Once home I sat down to my computer and realized with frabjous joy that my blog has a follower! OMG, yo! So I started surfing... found some very cool sites... hifructose, phantasmaphile, amysteinphoto.blogspot, drawn.ca, thomglick.blogspot.

Now I'm eating chips and drinking a beer saying to myself that it's quite alright and not so bad to live happily and well.


*photo by Miya Rostein

Tori Amos No More

The astounding photo I had posted here of Tori Amos was apparently pilfered from the wrong site and today, just now in fact, they snatched it back. C'est la. If you saw it, it was good; maybe you can sense how good by reading the comments posted here:))

Gertrude Kasebier

by Ellen Bass

The water over slick plates, river water
dark, thick, warm
as water is at night.

She pushes back her skirt, her sleeves
rolled above the elbow, dips her hands into the water,
soft, heavy, flooding the plates.

They told her photography is not creative.
She believed them
until now, these nights

her fingertips grooved like the sand of river beds,
the willow and black alder rustling, the owl's hoo hoo
resonating, she can feel its tremor in the water.
Wet. The wet scent of river mud, river grass.

Water is the color of night, liquid
black without reflection. River stones, the soft turf
of river bank, her own arms and hands
are vague in the shallow star light.

All night she crouches,
her knees imprinted with wet folds of her skirts,
her hands certain, familiar to water, fish.

All night the images emerge
in imperceptible degrees, as she dips and rinses,
dips and rinses, the rush of river
obscuring that faint hum of planets

until the lightening of
mass into form, shadow,
shades of gray, pale
tinge of color, dawn.
She gathers up her plates.

Walking back to the house she shivers,
thinks about breakfast, ham, buttered toast
in a pewter rack, the next night.

I care for you, I care for our world. If I stop caring about one it would be only a matter of time before I stop loving the other...

*Title excerpt by Pat Parker

I Honor the Twin Stars of My Day: Baking & Cooking

I had a moment the other day when I realized that I've been working as a baker for 14 years. I had no idea that my first job at the Hometown Bakery with Dan and Mary Lang in Morris, Minnesota would lead to such a wonderful career. As a visual artist I don't think it's much of a stretch for me to love the beautiful, process oriented world of pastry... at long last these two worlds have collided in a photograph of my own hands at work.

The world in which I could make a portrait of myself as a baker - in the way I love to make portraits, in the moment - does not exist. I am so often on the other side of the camera or lost in thought as I roll dough or I'm covered in a goo that has no business near a camera that I never truly imagined the power of seeing myself, my hands, at work in a photo like this. I like it.

*photo by Katy Gerdes

I Feel SO Much Better!!

*I found this image on Grace's Wild Pomegranate.

Happy Birthday!

Found, from Digging In

www.digging-in.blogspot.com

Damar the Starling

Grade School, Larry and Me

A few days ago Al asked me a simple, direct question about these pictures and it was all I could do to muster an answer without crying. She asked me why I posted these two particular photos of me and my brother since I never seem to put anything on this blog without an equally particular reason whether or not I choose to write about it. The brevity of my answer has been heavily on my mind. It's relatively easy to give voice to an aspect of this, or any relationship, but what's been on my mind is a persistent feeling of estrangement.

We were together most of our childhood which would seem obvious to anyone who's family has never been separated by divorce and craziness. (I didn't meet my older brother until I was about 9; he was someone I knew about and even named my goldfish after, but not someone who was part of my family.) It was always Larry and me no matter what was going on around us. We were buds.

It's not that we were inseparable but we definitely had some good times together. Dang! We'd get the giggles like no one else I've ever had the pleasure of giggling with. I always felt his little-ness and I was fiercely protective of him. The year these pictures were taken I punched a kid twice our size who'd been bullying Larry. Can you imagine what that kid looked like after I walloped him? I'm sure scrappy little me left quite a mark!

Even though we grew to be very different people I've always felt that we were close, until recently. I haven't really seen much of him or my older brother in the last few years although distance doesn't have to mean estrangement. The last time I saw Larry, which was briefly this summer, he spouted all this mumbo at me about my supposed feelings towards him, how I judge him to be a bad person, a bad father and that my living in Minnesota is an abandonment of him. Nothing I said to the contrary seemed to make any difference.

Mostly I think he was trying to tell me that he misses me and he wishes we would talk more and doesn't really know how I feel about him. What hurt me was what he said about my living in Minnesota as I'd decided years ago that if the distance between Minnesota (or anywhere) and Chicagoland equated the abandonment of my family then I would need to redefine what it meant to live my own authentic life. If I'd made peace with my decision why should his words have hurt me?

After thinking about this for a few days I realize that some part of me does feel that I've left him.

Hallelujah

By Leonard Cohen

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music now, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Baby I've been here before
I've seen this room and I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
But love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Well, maybe there's a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
It''s not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah...

We Must Call A Meeting

by Joy Harjo

I am fragile, a piece of pottery smoked from fire
made of dung,
the design drawn from nightmares. I am an arrow, painted
with lightning
to seek the way to the name of the enemy,
but the arrow has now created
its own language
It is a language of lizards and storms, and we have
begun to hold conversations
long into the night.
I forget to eat.
I don't work. My children are hungry and the animals who live
in the back yard are starving.
I begin to draw maps of stars.
The spirits of old and new ancestors perch on my shoulders.
I make prayers of clear stone
of feathers from birds
who live closest to the gods.
The voice of the stone is born
of a meeting of yellow birds
who circle the ashes of smoldering volcano.
The feathers sweep the prayers up
and away.
I, too, try to fly but get caught in the crossfire of signals
and my spirit drops back down to earth.
I am lost; I am looking for you
who can help me walk this thin line between the breathing
and the dead.
You are the curled serpent in the pottery of nightmares.
You are the dreaming animal who paces back and forth in my head.
We must call a meeting.
Give me back my language and build a house
inside it.
A house of madness.
A house for the dead who are not dead.
And the spiral of the sky above it.
And the sun
and the moon.
And the stars to guide us called promise.