Glad Game: Li’l Delights
Shortening and oil by tanker truck pulling up to the restaurant strip. Not a possibility I’d ever considered.
Cantaloupe for breakfast. And peaches. And fresh bread. The day just took the opposite of a nosedive.
Cycling thru the university student housing areas, saw this dino mattress. There’s something touchingly innocent about it. It naturally made me think of Spencer.
In the park we saw a little lad with a water gun. He was using it to water the poor thirsty flowers.
The readings this month all seem to be chugging along towards good stations. 10 readers for the one I’m organizing. The installation art goes up in about 2 weeks. There’s the idea that it could be shipped to other cities and reading series to do spin-off readings.
An took a train trip crossing the U.S. for weeks with a pass. What a delightful thing to do. She said,
What I found most striking about the train was the gradual shift in accents as we traversed the country. On a plane, the change is too fast. On a car, it’s isolated to quick stops for food and rest. But in the social sphere of the train, language plays an important role.
As each group boarded, the accents shifted subtly, most noticeably as we crossed deeper into the South. And as accents changed, so did conversation topics.
“Are you religious?” the older man next to me asked me point blank, the same way a New Yorker might ask me what I do for a living.
Got a prospect of seeing friends every day for the next few. That’s pretty sweet.
I got my new moo cards ordered. (This will be my 4th set. So there’s 300 of them floating around out in the world now. My.)
Today would have been my dad’s 83rd birthday. Slowly the calendar fills up with body memories of grief anniversaries but it also fills up with anticipation, movement, good anniversaries.
Sent away poetry submissions for an art chapbook thing to come out in November. Good to get that onto the done-list.
Seen at Canteen — binder clips with an edge that reads: Now, Today, This Week, This Month, or Sometime. That’s a neat idea.
The video poem project is getting underway. Getting down to now or never sort of thing. What was that expression? Our strategic plan is doing things.
The self-portrait project is still causing that sort of spine-ripple/nervous stomach knot of leaping into the unknown. It’s an energizing place to be.
Quote: “There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.” ~ Denis Waitley
Summer Festival Time
Bollywood for Fun was at the Lowertown Summer Festival yesterday and pulled in some audience participation…
including from this little girl who had no hesitation about going on stage. She may be (temporarily) short and young but her spirit owned the stage.
Eventually a few people came up to dance to a Bollywood-beat version of Pretty Woman while people in the back were dancing on the spot in the shade.
Lots of participants, things for sale, used books including a Men Can Cook dated cookbook (with cover art of hard boiled eggs and toast), food samples from the now doubled square footage Market Organics, gelato from Piccolo Grande to information available from green election to SPAO. And Canteen art cooperative I somehow missed the existence of before now as well as Islands Fold zine makers.
We’d have seen more but the park called and it was time to soak in more of the shorts and t-shirt weather from the vantage point of shady grass.
Apparently around the same time there was a pride rugby match on the lawn of Parliament Hill. This afternoon is the queer pride parade with 1200 or so expected in it and 30,000 or so expected to watch at the end of pride week.
And on a slower note, Your Secret by Jean-Sebastien Monzani:
[via Yes and Yes which also mentioned Plastic-Free Guide at FakePlasticFish came up with 70 ways to quit using plastic.]
Light Link: perhaps you’ve noticed those walking-aged kids in increasingly large strollers. Now there’s another option: The Tween Carrier to strap onto doting parent’s chest. [via]
Quote: “When we are turned so far inward that we begin to think we are a world unto ourselves, rather than a small part of an outside world, it becomes counterproductive.” ~ Michelle at We Forget to be Kind post at whollyafool.
Picture I
Berries spotted on a walkabout.
Shadows on the floor drew my eye.
There’s the Flickr set of my 365 Self-portraits, including out takes like the one above. I like the lighting, but was getting too hot. A half hour set up and another half hour shooting for a useable photo is madness. But then, I’m looking up a steep learning curve, not being familiar with timers nor tripod nor creating lighting. The top pick pic daily is at picture i, my newest blog to the extended blog family.
Why? I wonder what I’ll do, and what can be done, with this type of canvas. You can only appreciate any art for so far from an armchair and audience point of view. I’ve watched a couple projects unfold for a couple years, and gone thru about 7000 examples of what people do in these self-portrait endeavors. I think I’m oriented.
The objectives of the project for me are to play, to explore photography, styles, creating tones and visual presentation of image, to get over look of self and to learn to be familiar with the mortal coil. I can see how I’ve been pictured. In Patti Digh’s words, “Well, honey, what else might be true?”
I’ve noticed my brains start to click over to visual, drawing instead of words appearing at the end of my hand so I want to see what I can push of that. I suppose it’s a natural extension of upping the ante. After a few thousand daily pictures of food, a more challenging subject is the animate light plus an animate human. I’m the most accessible one. We’ll see where it goes.
[btw, added a flickr favorites set of my favorite of photos I've taken.]
Quote: “Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.” ~ Karl Marx
Glad Game: Down Time
Caption that…
a) a bear neck
b) when the leeches don’t work
c) when traditional medicine does nothing, try really non-traditional
d) gummy bears to the rescue!!
Glad Game: Happened to look out the window when a Monarch butterfly went past. Small chaos happiness.
A whole basket of peaches and I have a sneaking suspicion that not one of them will be around long enough to make it into a recipe. Mm, juicy.
And the other day a Peregrine Falcon sitting on a ledge outside my window not blinking at me. (Under that gaze my primeval inner mouse squeaked.) Beautiful creature tho.
Glad for walk to no where for nothing except the time together spent doing it and whatever comes or doesn’t come of it.
I’d like to be peak game and beaver away and complete with clarity and focus the next thing on tap but, nope, that ain’t happening now. I can forgive myself that rather than lashing myself.
At each stage of life I thought the Big Thing was ahead. High school, University, Career. Each would be the end of this bass awkward, hit and miss, never on the ball and not caring sort of environment. Each was the same but with different people. So there is no pure maturity. No steady run of intensity. Any good better be appreciated before it goes its fleeting way again. Got to get over one bad because the next won’t displace, just pile on. A whole life can be frittered. Do well, do badly, still end up at the end of the same day, tired. May as well do well, given the choice.
Glad for flotation. Particularly in hot bath on rainy, chilly night.
Glad for written records. Closed off a 4 year old paper diary. So much happens over that length of time.
Glad after decades of being acquaintance to the world, I finally am getting to know some of the world as friend instead.
I’m way behind in some emails. But on top of some at least. (There goes that silver lining inside out over the clouds again.)
I checked thru 3 deadlines of 4 for last week.
Did I mention gummy bear goodness? Wait, I did. Ok, I’ll mention it again.
Glad to get a photo to see friend’s fiancée. (Glad she checks out and looks happy with him.)
The pants still fit. Glad that I haven’t gained weight. Sure, my butt has, but it’s made a declaration that it’s breaking off and making its own independent person, so I’ve lost weight, really.
Glad for Lao-Tzu who said, “The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.” It says don’t worry differently than Matthew or Max Ehrmann. Different source and cause but same hush.
Quote: “Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other.” ~ Euripides
Love Came Here
Meaghan Haughian‘s Love came here (and held its breath) is an exhibit (Aug 19-22) at Blink Gallery (an artist-run cooperative) in Major Hill’s Park.
I first came across her work at La Petite Mort in 2007. I missed her show at new art festivaland at The Catwalk again this year.
One of the areas of the exhibit looks something like a hearth, doesn’t it?
I forget what one of the picture frames leaned against the wall has at its center, but I remember where the signature would be is a small cursive sshhhhhh.
I love the sense of whimsical play mixed in with the darkness of painting of a dismembered limb hung from a thread. There’s grief of an absence referred to mixed in with beautiful objects. It sets the brain humming across the gap somehow.
This exhibit is an installation of objects yet somehow how it comes together comes from the same process as her paintings. There’s collage and erasure, overlaps with variations in the objects as there is when she writes on canvases or paints on part of written pages. I rarely can feel visual art but I can this. All of objects, books, papers, paintings, tiny furniture and photos with the themes of red, and love, and loss, and limbs.
Meaghan was answering questions until I distracted with the camera.
People looking. And are encouraged to pick up and examine things. The bed of drawers and some exhibit visitors sets up a sort of sketch of a room, pared down.
Inside the one suspended drawer, torn apart chapbooks of he loves me, he loves me not. (She made them as part of BFA from Mount Allison University, NB in printmaking.)
An organic mobile. The theme of home symbolized as furniture and wallpaper, and limbs (human and tree) was in each of the areas of the installation, here as dollhouse hanging from a tree branch. As the day progresses, the lighting and shadows make it more animate and changing in effect.
The objects move around among the subjects, (or is that the subjects move around among the objects?) It’s intricately directed and open. There’s something about her depth of re-mix in her explored themes. A friend has one of her painting and something about the energy-intensity of it seemed recognizably her.
I hope you can catch something of the effect thru here if you can’t make it in person on the weekend.
When in the neighbourhood you might want to pop over to Anna Frlan’s installation at the Karsh-Masson Gallery within a block. It’s complementary, re-viewing the kitchen and dining room.
The table is made up of plasma-cut metal. The conversation is the table and the shadows of the words spill around from it almost like an echo of the sound radiating. The backs of the chairs cast long shadows like antennae. The kitchen downstairs is intriguing as well.
Quote: “We all write poems. It is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.” ~ John Fowles
