This day's blogpost could begin much like the former.
But premierly, a word about dumplings or what Yours Truly is now dubbing puffballs.
Last night I made old-fangled beef stew and decided to, following culinary guidelines, mix up dumplings for the first time. One thing to dig about cooking is gathering some know-how, riffs of sorts, favs, standbys, tricks, avoidances: but the first time with a recipe means following along, usually. So, not ever having made dumplings/puffballs Yours Truly (as is so not my wont) followed rules. And when I got to the part about adding in baking powder YT did some measuring of sorts and then actually became a bit alarmed as the baking powder hit the wet ingredients with the now fizzing concoction resembling the neat baking soda/vinegar science experiment of yore, emulating volcanos. But, adding in some flour, disaster was assuaged. Then the delightful plopping of dough into the magma stew, covering the pot, and then the voilà moment – dumped-up dumplings.
At the Hallwalls opening last night I talked cooking with a few pals who had already discovered the joys, the scientific mystery, of dumplings.
Artist Suzy Lake strolled about, as did about 700 others, down corridors until it was time to gather up the entourage and move along to Prespa for some background techno music, some more hijinx and then onwards into the icy Middling City night.

Onwards, Love.

Last night was the grand hoopla of The Church, the Limelightlike former congregation centre turned into a concert/revelling venue. Ani was there and had her tresses dyed darker than I've ever seen them before and we exchanged a nice embrace and a few words before Scot whisked her away, so she could stand at attention whilst some requisite speeches were proffered up. People paid attention until they did the B.S. (that'd be the Bored Shuffle, the weight-shift from left to right). Saw a myriad of good people and had a pleasant social onslaught.
Courtney Grimm and I walked arm-in-arm to the snack table (some sooth - poor aesthetics and an unappetizing mound of wraps... we sampled greasy crab cakes and moved along) until I became much more interested in introducing myself and her to the most interesting-looking man in the room. His name - Junior. He, as all Juniors and Tinies are, is huge, maybe 6'something" and he weighed in at about 300lbs. There was a woman hovering nearby and I asked if she was in Junior's entourage. That's my wife, Junior said.
Deb said she was there and I did not, sadly, see her. Dr. John, for whatever reason was there, I did see him and his spindly date.
The space: what was the big-assed church is now painted well in greens and gold (as in color, not leafing), is lit better, has no more pigeons, and is going to be the big-assed rock & roll venue.
That is impressive. The Hallwalls spaces I found less so - the gallery has a nice basswood floor and much has been made of its malleable wall formations. I thought their basement screening/rumpus room was disappointingly small. I imagined the org having to turn away scads of would-be viewers as the room's capacity is a mere 65. Think big. Think bigger.
Glad to see Hallwalls finally in their new home and it is impressive what's transpired under the renovated spires. Good for the Middling City.
Today it is a smattering of snow, a day to work and work and work before play and play and play.

Love to play.

Well. Well well well.
Very well, indeed.
Yours Truly has been, off and on and mostly on, imbued in the oeuvre and it has been a Pleasure, wallowing in this huge collection of art, publication samples, words, even old posters from the feted and fated Writers Cramp Series that Paul Hogan and I ran for aeons.
Found some surprises, like old coins from dead Uncle Richard, personal and historical photographs, a stash of forgotten ca$h. But not even what I am searching for - yet. When and if this objet is found I will then say what it is.
Delivered some super-fine images I shot for a campaign for a Middling City org to an MC ad agency and while going up I nearly lost my foot in the steel doors for one who came a-runnin'. The proverbial voice of Holdit. And what a one he was, a visual surprise, a Shiney Apple-like man that one does not usually see on this edge of things. As we noted that YT nearly lost a foot he got off on 8, wishing me a fine weekend. Manners to boot.
Tonight Kennedy and I are attending the righteous Hallwalls/Righteous Babe Records grand hoopla, the one that shows off what is nearly done. Tomorrow night is the Hallwalls-only opening of a show of work by unimpressive Suzy Lake. This event is to trumpet a grand addition to the MC art scene. I discussed this with Bruce who asked What art scene.
My pal Pam is catering tomorrow's affair and she told me she's donated all the food, roughly to the tune of $1K. Absolutely one of the most generous people ever.
Amongst stops and sojourns last evening stopped into Charlie Quill's b-day fiesta at Nietzsche's and was happy to see Kelly et al and then on to the usual spot to see Shana and Jeremy and the music was surprisingly quite compelling.

Love is compelling.

The theme du jour is rubbernecking.
Good, old-fashioned swivel-heading, as Yours Truly prefers to call this phenom that swims deep within our human genome, to witness with our own eyes, via reality or other, handy media, the turmoil of others.
En route to a gig this fine and magical AM with the Middling City air teeming with the vibes of spring, I nearly landed in the midst of a parking lot freeway situ but exited promptly on one of those handy north-south streets that one discovers only from having a freelance career involving deadlines, and loads of driving to the sub and ex urbs.
When I arrived at my gig I was informed that this traffic miasma was due to a truck lying on its side, an accident that happened yesterday.
En route back from the gig I could see the truck, still ominously occupying the left shoulder and the backed-up traffic behind it so everyone could get a good gander and a half.
While at the gig YT photographed various people who use the facilities in which I had set up my temp studio and then made secondary images of said facilities. While wending through the sweat-infused gymnasium and weight room and rooms full of those silly machines, there in front of us was one MC newscaster femme fatale. Attempting to avoid rubbernecking, she had outfitted herself with very dark sunglasses. The sporty portion of this joint is not bright. The newscaster f.f. was just looking to not be noticed. I was fantasizing about rushing her with a Sharpie, asking that she sign... something, anything.
And I culled from the Memory Centre how once, perhaps a decade and a half ago how YT was in a fashion show at a television studio, produced by a couture collector. If you can imagine some such thing in the MC. While readying ourselves for our face time, I'll use that phrase as it's so... now, so industry-savvy, we were bombarded by the very same femme newscaster who burst into the dressing room where about five of us were getting made up. She blustered in, bitching fiercely about her blow dryer. Now, not ever having been much of a television afficianado, I asked one of my fellow models, as the blustery newscaster f.f. was, I thought, just out of earshot Who the HELL was that bitch.
As You may have guessed. Yes.
We have necks, we use them. We have insights, we use them.

Rubbernecked Love.

As is my wont, I was minding my own business and found myself looking at a large display of seeds, following a business meeting. I first looked at the oversized packages of vegetable seeds and then moved around to the flowers, thinking all the while just what and where and how.
Then I followed along the quite remarkably gigantic half-aisle of bird feeders (oh, did I tell You that I recently bought the absolute Cadillac Escalade of squirrel-proof bird feeders) to the shelves of confused houseplants and found myself then shoving three of these sad little orphans into the cart. And then moved on to the nearly-free racks of narcissi, buying two. It is not too late in the season to force bulbs as, in this Perfect world, bulbs can be forced until it's the season of deep-fried skin and popsicles. I rest my flower-luvvin' case.
Speaking of case(s), what needs to happen to keep that forgetful racist Alito out of the Supreme Court, short of driving down to Warshington to protest. NPR did a wacky thing today, calling one Al Ito to ask him some trivial questions.
Blogs do rule and they may just become the sole way to keep up up and away with the news.
Lest you have missed this grand blog, go here now.

Memory of shooting FBI-issued firearms love.

This just in, from a loyal epinw peruser.
Yours Truly awaiting rock & roll action. I look very unpsyched, must've been Bon Jovi or some such nonsense.
Misty water-coloured memories...

Misty Love.

The Shiney Happy Mag piece is done. The jubilation which follows the hand-in/the email-in is incomparable. Really. I mean, really, would Yours Truly lie to You.
A scintillating piece of hard-hittingness about where in Blazes to purchase excellent crap and the like for your joint. To make it, shall we say, sophisticated.
Here is a shining example of my flavour:

Décor, like a wardrobe, is a personal collection ever in a state of flux – assuming, of course, that one is not clinging stubbornly (or ironically) to tired, decades-old articles. In both matters home and sartorial, pieces illustrating personality are amassed in the same ways, on jaunts of all sorts, and as gifts. And both may suddenly fall out of favor and be taken out of circulation in a jiffy.

Now that's writing. A dash of irony, some handfuls of fact, some Perfect personality all melded together in one informative, cohesive stream.
I began the finishing across the table from Laura (who was knee-deep in homework) and now I am across the table (kittie-korner) from a stranger named Gina. A teacher. A person who sings to herself. If she had kept that little habit up I would have dashed the rest of my venti coffee du jour at her. She stopped. I sipped. I split.

Love's split.

Yours Truly began this fine, sunny Middling City day at the gravesite of a dead president of the United States of America. Today, lest you don't have this inked into your Day-Timer, is the birthday of one Millard Fillmore, also a founder of the MCClub and MCU medical school. What happens at the event is the laying of wreaths, some speeching, some singing and/or bugle reditions of tunes, all under the ever-watchful gazes of two members of the Knights of Columbus, in capes and feathered hats. As is custom, it was a freezing cold morn and after the last notes are still hanging over the tombstones, all in attendance split to their cars lining the cemetery roadway.
Onwards then to search out a few more joints to include in the Shiney Happy Mag piece.
As I motored back to the home office hovel I spotted a woman maniacally talking in her automobile and wondered a very modern thought:
In this day and age does one suspect another of insanity when said other is speaking to apparently no one in the auto - or, more tech-centrically, does one assume one is speaking to another, distant other via a cellphone set to speaker mode.
I ask you.

Asking Love.

As a guilty pleasure, namely Norah Jones (that track #5) warbles in the background and every record store geekboy I know and have ever known I hear cackling & moaning & groaning now suddenly so heartily I can barely hear her singing about that yellow or whatever grass all high and shit any more. Thanks, guys.
Because I can I am deciding I must paint my nails Red, Red Rhine. You know, I must have selected this colour as I do all of them, by name, and as We all do know Yours Truly loves Neil Diamond more than most people, etc. and Neil did pen that song Red Red Wine. See, all things in sooth can be Perfect if We just freakin' look hard enough.
Yours Truly has just been tweaking, if I can deign to call it that, a hand-crafted website using some allegedly simple software, Freeway. I have been communicating today with websitegeekboys, none of whom were able to offer up any super-helpful hints and there were no offers of an onsite rescue effort.
So Imagine:
YT sipping a coffee, nervously following along with the pamphlet that came with Freeway, all stressed out as I am having flashbacks to art school and that godawful and binge drink-inspiring weekly seminar called god only knows what... the one in which YT struggled not only with the diabolical DreamWeaver (amusing myself, and classmates, as you loyal epinw'ers know, by singing, fingers up in my rock gesture, the song DreamWeaver) but to hear the instructress's pianissima voce over the whirr of the Parsons School of Diabolical Seminars's a/c system, set to Arctic.
DreamWeaver, Freeway, Passports to Hell.
Well, I did follow along paranoically and did build myself a slammin' 1-pager and finished and thought Cheesh, I wanted a mega-page site. Now I'm trying to retrofit some more intermediate info onto the rickety and rinky-dink 1-page wonder to not-quite great effect. So I just randomly began toggling about like I knew what I was doing. I did and still do not.
As an artist I do resent having to follow directions and I think directions sometimes are for followers, the weak-minded. But it appears I'll have to follow a bit closer to get pages 2, 3 and beyond flowing like a DreamWeaver towards the morning light.

Always. DreamWeaver. Love.

Richard Wicka has been kindly sending me along commentary about my Five Minute Video Series contribution and, surprisingly, there have been a smattering from far and wide - not just emanating from the Middling City. One person from MC, however, did review my tale and ended by referring to me as a Snuggle bunny. Yipes. I gave a hard-hitting account of an event, presented it in a gripping style veering into comedic interludes. I would hardly classify this narrative style or presentation as being that of a . . . Snuggle bunny.
So another holiday slew of mayhemic events has passed and it's back to beeswax, so to speak, getting the last of the wrapping paper jetsom into la poubelle.
Wrapping up a little piece for the Shiney Happy Mag, a Pulitzer-worthy assessing of joints to get home accessories and the like. I walked into one place in the midst of an MC storm looking quite like a girl version of the Unibomber before I defrocked and let the proprietess know I meant her no harm, just free publicity, some glorious ink.
Time to sort through matters, snip off loose ends, correspond and more.

Corresponding Love.

O, happy day.
Moments ago received a package from Bill down in the PA and much to my joy and amazement it is much-coveted venison jerky that I found a few times on non-aimless roadtrips and never could ever quite manage to find again, though I did look with racing eyes amongst the sad racks of mass-produced beef teriyaki product and such.
A whole pound of venison jerky is mine, mine, mine, mine.
I will share, however.
If You would care for a slice of deerly flesh cured and spiced up, just freakin' ask.
Resolution of new year: Meet Yoko Ono.
Off shortly to purchase some lobsters, dead.
With a gift cert from Perfect Mom & Dad I did purchase my first-ever Big Girl matchy-snatchy set of cookware (including 8-quart stock pot with fitting steamer ever-ready for lobsters and such but I'd rather buy them dead, maybe even beheaded). More about the pots: I do have a rag-tag assemblage of pots and pans that are excellent but needed more (some cast iron, some Le Creuset, some other heavy-enough-to-be-weapons items). These pots and such are not all related Le Creuset in that gorgeous sage green they have now - but they will do.
Oh, more than do, they will make, do, and be.
It has snowed out in the Middling City, one of those half-assed droppings just enough to make the wearing of suede boots or shoes not such a good idea but not enough to make some quality snow sculpture.
Parties as of late have been satisfying and far-reaching of cast of characters:
- Jamie and Paul Johnson held their final holiday party on Ashland in the Big House before they move to their improved row house around the corner. Paul has turned into quite a real estate mogul. At this party I was informed by one that he, in a cold meds haze, caught my Five Minute Video on cable access in the dead of night. I also saw Rockstar Tony there which was great, as was getting reunited with Hillary H, not to be confused with Hillary C.
- Loomis's parents - Ed & Joan - held that swingin' party up in Canada and the only bad spot was when she insisted on feeding the two fam dogs generous hunks of Stilton. As I informed her last night as we swung ourselves down to Hardware for yet more holiday action, Stilton is for Nancy, not for dogs.
- Was invited last night to Deb's for some of her supreme matzoh balls, and soup. What do I dig more than mballs+soup, fruitcake (for real), venison jerky. Well, alot, but hell, for literature's sake let Us say Not a dang-blamed thang.

Pyrotechnics of a New Year's Love.

I left the slippery to drive along the slippery to the even more slippery, steel bridge, to the party this strange winter night. I wended through woods and roads thinking I'd miss a sign but no and ended at the house somewhat familiar. There is nothing quite like the feeling of arriving at a party, of seeing faces through the windows smiling, thinking in a flash, in an entrance, in a scrape of boot, I will be joining, will be a guest, one of them.
I demanded a fireplace moment, Loomis made it happen as the logs had dimmed. I needed a full-on, full-view of a heap of logs afire. Maybe like others need gravlax, or a withering christmas tree, or cocoa. I needed the stinkin' fire this night and I got the fire.
I Got the Fire: The Nancy J. Parisi Story.
Amongst others tonight, as at last night's fete, I met a person who will catapult me into my new venture/adventures.
I am not delving into detail yet.
What I will say is that the nouveau Neil Diamond is Perfection.
What I will also say is that the new Mercury Rev is grand but track #7, In a Funny Way, is a song that gets Yours Truly SCREAMING with delight.
And that is always a delight, the delight of YT.
In a funny way I am ever your epinw correspondent.

Ever Love.

Sometimes precautions backfire.
Not only might this be attributable for perhaps, for the sake of epinw argument, 10% of the planet's human population - certainly not that of bombus fervidus - but of belongings gone missing, good intentions and plans gone haywire.
sidenote: Yours Truly thinks that this haywire business might be yet another example of agrarian holdover in our lingua that we no longer recognize as such. And, I imagine, that haywire was a farmly article that could, from time to time, snap back, break loose, causing some sort of bodily harm.
YT is in process of a refinancing/reevaluating kind of thing. Amongst trudging duties is paying a wack of dough to have a building rescoped/reappraised. This meant an appointment with a stranger and an agent de moi suggested that, being a femme and all, a femme surveyor of scenes be used. So I do not confirm a theoretical reappraising situ for today but get a message from the femme in question that she'll be present and accounted for and accounting all things good & bad in a few, as in hours.
So this appraising femme shows up and she scares me.
As I told Kennedy if she had said Oh, I am a bounty hunter in actuality and do this property-related shit on the side I would not have questioned her burly faux-blonde figure at all. She clucked her tongue in a most peculiar manner, made odd comments, asked even odder questions, and was ever curt and snide, matching the demeanour at hand - or afoot.
She did not bother to open doors to things (hey, who the hell is YT to tell a bounty hunting appraisor how to do their gig) but instead would inquire as to what lay beyond or behind things. She did note decrepitude and such and when she left I felt a need to burn sage but had none so a quick vacuum of her bounty hunter bad vibes had to suffice.
Moral: bounty hunter types walk amongst us in a cornucopia of forms, including the mall-esque lady version, but if one is not a scofflaw one must only dodge verbal barbs, not TASERS.

Sage Love.

Two somewhat horrific things Yours Truly includes for dramatic and narrative effect.
For f-b*mb's sake, YT is a writer and may a: let It all hang out; b: investigate the incomplete and the effusive and the uncomfortable (related to a.); and c. narrate and dramaticize.
So, there YT is, in the midst of the familial portion of this holiday, this mid-Hanukah and Kwanzaa Eve = Christmas. The one with Jesus is the reason for the season, key player.
sidebar: Rio informed me, non-truthfully, that a banner hangs above her familial KY home stating same so that Santa knows that we are not heathens. I move along.
I am at the home where I was raised, so to speak, from age 2-20, before I hit the awaiting adult world that has led me, convolutedly, to this place. I am in that home, Christmas night. The place where my parents live, where I am from time to time bumping up against the past of me that is awkward and I would like to say jam-packed with familiarities that are pleasant but I cannot.
The usual hodgepodge, collage of the good, bad, adolescent, etc.
At some point in the holiday proceedings two highly evocative/awkward things happen.
The first is that, in the midst of one of my tales, my father claims that he has heard the tale-in-progress before. I question him. A few times. I realize that the only place he ever - ever - could have heard this traipsing and difficult tale was here, on epinw. epinw. My dad is an abashed epinw reader. For once he was busted he could not admit to anyone, even Perfect me, that he reads this daughterly blog.
The other horrendous thing was this.
When I was a child I wrote poetry beyond the abilities of a child but nonetheless I was still a child. When I was a child I lived at the home of my parents and discarded a few hand-written books of poetry written by me as a child into the ol' trash, to learn, in complete shock and horror, that these books had been dredged from the trash by my mother and were being not only read by her but read aloud to gatherings of her lady pals.
I have told, here and there, others of this not only lapse of judgement but lack of homestead privacy and tonight sat diplomatically as one of these high school books of pomes was again extricated from the archive, cracked open (I was catapaulted down memory lane when I saw the little Asian, hand-bound volume) and in-part read aloud.
I had to step outside of myself and say to YT OK, this is your mother and obviously she derives some happiness out of this and your ever-thickening skin can survive this newest fiasco.
What made an entire weekend of ebbing & flowing, self-congratulatory holiday smarm tolerable were a few final hours spent with old friends - Erin and Justy - at the newer Middling City joint of gatherings and such. And what really was the proverbial whipped cream and jimmies (if you go for that sort of thing) on the whole tasty escapade was a meeting-up with a woman - Peggy - in a wolfhead. I made her pinkie swear we could be pals. We did. She is the assistant to the director of the Salvador Dali joint in Florida, so close to the land of Papa and cigars and home to alligators and whatever else. Oh, that team.
So Peggy Wolfhead when saying goodbye opened up her plastic jaws and spread them atop my head and I let out my patented MeatScream that was perfected oso long ago by YT and Elba in the midst of Summer Camp Chaos. It is a from-the-toes kind of scream and one was emitted by Perfect me as the faux wolf had my scalp, stopping all action in the room, a similar sensation was being hit by that car whilst riding my bike, the feeling of being in a vacuum.
The moral of the story is this.
Every counter-intuitive event which cramps the soul and psyche and style needs an antithetical faux-wolf moment, a delicious and spontaneous encounter with grace and art and kindred joie-de-vivre.

Faux Wolverine Love.

Today Yours Truly is photographing foster kids who are pre-teenish and looking for a permanent living gig. The two I'm photographing today are siblings and are in a temp situ. I was just talking to teahouse Jen telling her of my next stop and we discussed how foster girls at this age sometimes land in less-than-stellar places - sometimes to be the live-in babysitter, sometimes worse. I told her of my decade of working with the Summer Camp, how half the 8-12 year olds there were fosterized, how some of them had horrific tales. My assignment is to make these kids look so adorable that they get scooped up by good people. There is a slew more of occasions to bust out holiday tights and the like. Jamie and Paul are having their ultimate gathering at their supersonic house that they redid from shingles to front steps, before the relocate to a rowhouse somewhere nearby. Then there's another soirée in Loomis's honour in a week, at her parents's Canadian shorehouse. Jen, rushing YT, just slapped my check on the table stating Time's a-wastin'. So off I go there and points be-be-beyond.

Foster Love.

Dubithy:

Somewhere under the radar, way down low.
There's a land that I heard of once, where the oil still flows.
Somewhere under the radar, folks are screwed.
And the schemes that you dare to scheme really do come through.
One day I wrecked the family car, and daddy and my mummy Bar remind me,
Of my troubles taking acid drops, the night they had to call the cops,
And then they fined me.
Somewhere under the radar, I'll get high. Drink Rye under the radar,
Try, oh yes I'll still try
Why, why must I be dry?
(The above was forwarded to me by Paul Morgan of Avalon Scarves fame and the entire, brilliant adaptation can be seen here.)

This notion that El Presidente is in fact dry and ryeless seems rather at odds with his behaviour as of late, most notably his press conf yesterday about spying and wiretapping any available and questionable American up and out the wazoo as Papa/El P/Bush deems necessary. I did catch one quick visual soundbite with him answering a press corps question. To paraphrase: It's about your safety . . . it's about your civil liberties.
Hmmm, last I heard this genre of practice was completely opposite what good ol' civil liberties are about.
Onwards.
As there is a transit strike in the Shiney Apple, something threatened for about a week, I opted out of pre-miasmic - nay, make that Double Miasmic - conditions and am hanging in the Middling City until post-strike, post-holiday-travel-meltdown.
Over the weekend Yours Truly met up with a college pal, writer Harold Goldberg, firmly entrenched in the Shiney Apple and writing each and every day.
Besides the Perfection that is epinw, YT does a smattering of writing.
I have been back to drawing, not the drawing board, but grooving on my pencils and such and do still feel slightly bemused when others find great joy, etc. in this scrawling.
I now embark into the MC WW (white wasteland) to pick up Dorota and Jason at the MC "International" Airport and then points beyond.

Well-balanced Love.

With the help of Nick, my new record shoppe pal, I discovered that the Nouveau Neil is out when Yours Truly believed there must be weeks to go. But of course Neil released his new gems out into the world now, in time for the holiday hoopla and gift-giving sector of the calendar and such. What I've paid attention to so far has been wondrous - Neil (and fercrissakes I do hope that you know I write most lovingly and obviously about Neil as in Diamond, resonant voice of the 70s and beyond) and backup musicians, all new material written by Neil. At a soirée last night I revealed my Neil Luvv and an alternamusician claimed to love Neil, too. I suspected that this was a move to sound hip, now, etc. Other record shoppe purchases that sojourn were the new Sigur Ros (always a grand choice for winter), the digital v of Bright Eyes, and partyrific Gorillaz (featuring that inescapable iPod song so overplayed at the Geek/Mac Clubhouse).
Worked an hourly wedding last night that stretched and stretched away, so much so that it caused me to pass on party number one. I did my trademarked party drive-by, sussing out if it was in high or low gear, gleaning info from the shadowy heads or lack thereof and clues from nearby cars. My clues pointed to move on. And so I did.
When I did arrive at the second joint I informed my co-hostesses that I had been held hostage by a wedding. I attempted to eat snackdinner but was thrown off my nosh course by Mary who desperately wanted me to dance. So I said Cheesh, my friend May wants to freakin' dance, who cares any more about stinkin' bean dips and such.
At some point I decided it was necessary to get a running start and skid along the hardwood floor into the dance floor action. I made a few others do the same.
I busted out my new toy, the iZone digital camera and found it to be fraught with a few glitches but do love its size and design.
It is time to call this a wrap and do some holiday wrapping and wending through snow and sip and sup some holiday cheers.

Love, wrap it.

Completely, resolutely minding a business that was nobody's but mine own, tonight, the following transpired out in the Middling City suburbs, during a freelance gig.
I arrive during an ice storm, a real throw-down of crystals thick and hard, rendering the landscape a death trap, a suicide rap. Baby, you like were so not born to run during this shit.
I digress. Momentarily. As is my wont, and your pleasure.
I am at the gig. I am waiting for things to get proverbially rolling. You know, things like intros, helpful hints, a discreet waiting and drawing-out of time as if another few dozen may traipse on in during the death rain of icy terror. Death Rain of Icy Terror: Middling City Winter Rants.
I digress again.
So I am waiting, even leaning against a wall at one point when I note a rustling on the other side of the wall and this rustling is rather loud during the intros which have finally begun. There are blinds on the inside of the windows to this glass-walled office I am leaning on. I peer into the blinds and note a small old man on the other side of the glass/blinds.
The man keeps rustling about. Perhaps he's trapped, Perfect me thinks to my ever-helpful self.
More rustling.
Finally, I try the door and it opens.
I stick my head in and ask the codger Hey, do you need to get out of here. Thinking he's demented, stuck, lost, disoriented after hours.
The man says nothing and just stares at me rather oddly. He may have muttered something but it was so illegibile, as it were/was/is as to be ignored.
So the intros continue. There is even an intro video that the guest artist has provided, probably carried with him in his carry-on. And here it should be noted that the guest artist is a world-renowned vocal coach who has worked with the likes of Judy Garland's equally-doped-up kid, some other vocal luminaries. Et al. Et freakin' al. Testimonials are read. Famous names such as Tony Bennett praising the work of the featured guest artist.
So all is finally stinkin' over. It is time for the guest artist to hit the stage, actually just a few simple risers fronted by some super floral arrangements that would be suitable for any gravesite. So it's time. The guest artist is to appear. Is he sitting in the front row. Will the guest artist descend from the stairs like a cheeseball musical.
No.
The guest artist emerges from behind the blinds/glass office.
He muttered in shock, Yours Truly imagines, for YT not knowing who his vocal eminence is.
Hey, I see a senior in apparent need and I dive right in. You know, being ever-helpful.
From there it was on to Soup Night at Monique and Blair's joint.
I had dropped, pre-gig, my soon-to-be-famed Brazilian soup and by the time YT appeared in their spec kitchen it was nearly a distant evaporated memory. So I ate Blair's scorching soup instead. It was high times, subtle misdemeanours. I realized at one point a demi-room of people was hanging on to a story I was regaling at some familiars. Then the somewhat edited version emanated.
It is time to move along.
It is time to think more art thoughts.
And dream soupy dreams.
Beautiful soup, beautiful soup, soup of the evening, beautiful soup.
So said Mock Turtle during Alice's foray into the Fantastic.

Fantastic, soupy Love.

(Perfect me wished this what does this have to do with the prix of bananas image at the end of this post but here it rests front and center. It is a shot of the nouveau flagship pornorific A+F store in the Shiney Apple, outfitted with oversized photographic images of models with oversized ab muscles. Focus in on the ab muscles to the right of the image. Terrifying.)


Just downloaded a plethora of musique, via the full-on wi-fi molecules emanating from the Airport of the tea joint, and for some oddball reason FireFox was unable to hack it and had to use boring ol' Explorer. I mean really.
Jen just lit my little tea candle and, before setting it down, asked that I not set anything afire. I asked if I had before. I do seem to recall something nearly blazing at this tea joint but think it may have been Allen's fault. I did set a menu afire at another nearby restaurant whilst resting it upon a candle. Perhaps Jen is clairvoyant. Perhaps I emanate pyromaniacism.
Perhaps I should depart this tea joint as I've been sitting and working here so long on their hardassed wood chair that I am certain that the arse of Yours Truly is as flat as they once believed the Earth was centuries ago.
I have slightly committed to an art exhibit and have work shuttling off to the bi-annual CEPA auction next month. There's creative fire for You. Some good-natured fuel for the artful adrenaline boosters. Technical shit.
More tech shit:
satellite radio, not nearly as expensive as You might think. And shortly the sole way to hear beloved Howard.
Trudy of the tea joint just gave me a graduation present after explaining that I completed my Master of the Universe degree late August and now am ruling my own aesthetic universe.
Tonight I make soup. Tomorrow night I make soup for a party. Saturday I make yet more soup for yet another party.
Soup, like photography and other genres of creative expression, is art.
Like a good bowl of chawan mushi - each bite/spoon a tiny universe, a whorl of opposing textures and colours.

Love's textures, colours.

Last night I was out with Liz and JimB and at some point they mentioned that HOOats is under attack by the Natives as this, it turns out, is the future site for the dreaded Middling City casino. Not the waterfront, really, as described by Middling City News, but a distance away on an industrial block with a few businesses, some open space. I drove a short way to this wreckage and felt like my parents's generation may have as they watched Olmsted's Delaware Park get sliced in half for an expressway. Progress and change and history slips away, bit by bit, in this Middling City. I watched as the cast iron bridges were torn down in my neighborhood/The Historic Old First Ward, told my engineers and planners and politicians that these were hazards and were too costly to fix. So I shot them, preserved their images, and down they crashed. Now HO Oats, immortalized by several photographically (YT, the Bechers, et al), is being wrecked by the Sovereign Senecas. They are saying that the brick portion of the grain elevator is getting yanked down (JimB pointed out his buddy's company name - Empire Dismantling) but not the elevators themselves. We shall see. The head of the Sovereigns stated that the Senecas were once chased from Buffalo Creek and now they are back, Forever.
About to embark on a sleuthy gig for a woman, documenting someone, unbeknownst to them, for a holiday gift.
Parting mantra: Industry is beauty.

Beautiful, industrial Love.

The year before the shit hit the NJP fan, the year when Dark Side of the Moon landed in my ten-year-old hands and changed my mind about all I thought I knew about understanding and poetry and such until that point, there was John and Yoko on Mike Douglas. Somehow I watched Mike Douglas, a grownup talk show in the late afternoon. (Somehow, also, I watched the inappropriate-for-kids Love American Style at lunchtime, munching on my pbj as I watched comedy about blow-up dolls, oral, and the like). These two took it over, so to speak, in '72 and I watched it all. The militancy, the guest artists, the staccato explanations of the way things were. And Mike, earnest Mike, watery-eyed, took it all in, as did I. The only way I heard the Beatles music and Lennon was via my older cousins as I was a freakin' kid with no money but an AM radio, cousins, a cast-off manual typewriter from my father in the basement on my grandfather's cast-off carved desk, and daydreams. I loved John before most men I have known (or sort of known) because of his earnest artist demeanour - that what he made is serious so, therefore, what you made is and could be, too. His music went beyond entertainment, became the music of dreams, of psyche, of inspiration, of pain, of all the everyday welts of life. His nose, in my opining, surpasses those of all others and remains the greatest nose that ever breathed upon the earth. His eyes were those that are a surprise, the type that no matter how many times you glance into surprise with their colour and depth. He wrote, drew, protested, loved, and still wanted to, despite the CPW situ and such, remain a pedestrian, someone who could walk in the park and breathe and be. John Lennon's legacy is to remind all artists that it's not only important to make work and be true to the muse, but to use the muse to push social change, what is good for the world, a goal that surpasses those flimsy goals of most politicos and so-called spirituals.
All we are saying is give peace a chance, he wrote as an artist, he said, to update the message of peace beyond We Shall Overcome.
Imagine.

Imagined Love.

Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of John's death and I will not be in the Shiney Apple in Strawberry Fields as I was five years ago. But at midnight tomorrow night, wherever I find myself, I'll sing Imagine as They will be over there, as is custom.
To commemorate, celebrate John I've been looking at Memories of John Lennon which I bought last week - a compilation of essays by people who knew him.
I like what hardassed Norman Mailer wrote:
We have lost a genius of the spirit.
And the whole assemblage of Annie Leibovitz's rolls from the famed shoot mere hours before The End are in the book, You know, the famed clothed Yoko/naked John shots.
Last night, post free free jazz gig, had a band meet-up of sorts with ScottV and then suddenly Kunji, who was also there, presumed that she could join Our band, KnifeCall. I said diplomatically that Scott and I needed to have another band meeting to discuss. I threatened to leave the band and begin a solo career.
Kunji, not even a member (!) wants to change the name.
She also did not even seem agreeable to the band uniform.
The Who's Pictures of Lily (about porn & such, lest you did not hear the news about three decades ago) is on the hi-fi, a fine place to sign off in a post about feting life and creative expression, even if it involves some good-natured sparring.

KnifeCall Love.

ps: should You be so inclined, check out my FiveMinuteVideo, edited by supersonic Richard Wicka, @

This, Yours Truly is pleased to pronounce, is one well-researched blogpost: as in field work, a lifelong string of taste tests, and a half-assed Google search.
Wow, and what a Googling that was. And no Wikipedia ref . . . yet.
This holiday season (trust me, You must, this will be all handily tied together but you must slog through, like a well-hung Dickens paragraph) I would like to propse in lieu of guilt-addled resolutions (and I've blogged many a year about this practice of resolving) that each and every one of You instead embrace a guilty pleasure. And embrace this guilty pleasure, whatever it might be, at least once a month for in embracing such we embrace who we ARE, not what we think we might like to be. And by guilty I think of things that are silly, out of our alleged element(s), kitschy, crapful, puerile, adult.
A few days ago, while merrily lunching on a gas station tuna sandwich I came up with all of the above, now blogged to inspire You.
I have horrified some by my love of tuna (even eliciting tales of poisoned horror, warnings from strangers - the old retired engineer in midtown East, for one) to begin with and even more by my adoration of the gas station tuna sandwich. I am a food snob yet love them. It's like that Middling City sushi chef who dug hotdogs. I speak of him in past tense as he split the MC.
Perfect gas station tuna sandwiches have a strange sweetness (NOT like the egg salad sandwich I ate in the Shiney Apple this summer whose underbelly was covered with a black mold that tasted oddly sweet-n-sour... until I wretched it into a garbage can), are wrapped lovingly, have little chunks of color. Cost about $2.
Yours Truly plans on eating at least 1/mo. in '06.
Thanks for your tuna attention in this matter.
You can share your guilty, sanguine, secret pleasures with me any time before 12/31.

Guilty, delicious Love.

Lest you wonder.
Lest you wonder where Yours Truly might be post-asscrack-of dawn tomorrow.
You will find YT at a ribbon cutting at Middling City U.
Bright eyes, tail all bushy, as they say.
Meandering through my beloved SPIN I discovered there's a new Sigur Ros and that is also on tomorrow's make&do list.
And then there was an ad in the same issue for Lady Sovereign, which thrilled me as it jogged the memory of the words of rec by Mats as something to give a whirl to: he is a jazz star but one who straddles the world of alternative rock and sometimes combines the two in practice, who is not afraid to have The Thing (his trio'd jazz ensemble with guest *'s) cover, for a primo example, The White Stripes. Though you may not be able to hum along, it's the melodic and appropriative thought that counts.
So over drinks post-Thing gig Mats raved about Lady Sovereign, a young lady rap artiste.
And together we enthused about White Stripes' new one, a perfect assemblage.
I neglected to ask Mats if he ever puts forth a cd with any known weak links or if they are all, in his mind, or his producer's mind, a string of perfection.
String of Perfection, dang, another fine band name.
Bought last Beethoven's 3rd and 4th piano concertos, inspired by hearing one of them on a radio station beaming out of Toronto's environs - one of those perfect moments when music matches landscape. But, in record store situ, I could not recall if it was indeed B's piano concerto #3, #4, or #5. I figured that the Frenchies effusing over the recording must be doing such for a new recording so, super-sleuthically, I had Mary at B&N record centre Google away and she said there was a new v of #3 and #4. I have listened. I think it is the rondo of #4 that had me.
Interpol out of iTunes at this second is matching my landscape.
Without music life would be like food with no taste.

No taste = No love

Tech disaster.
Why o why is the epinw OKcounter suddenly askew. The people who made the skin for it are in Korea and their site is a bramble patch of demi-English and demi-Korean = a challenge for sure.
Online at Middling City U in a quadrant of the library I thought was reserved for collections searchers. How utterly wrong I am for this is, unbeknownst to me as of 15 minutes ago, The Gratis Online Centre. So what if it's on a crappo Dell pc with blindingly wiggly-jiggly screen that seems to be in green-o-vision. Hey, I like green a lot but this screen is making me feel sea sick.
Heading out to Toxicville to perhaps acquire some holiday gifts and cheer for others.
Time to head north.
Time to sign off.

No love for Toxicville.

Today has been one Perfect, well-balanced day of excellent freelance gigs of a photo nature, of interesting people and so engaged was I with photo subject numero uno that we talked for over an hour which floated by in a freeform, coffee-fueled blip. This is one thing I most dig about my life: I get assignments, I arrange, I arrive, I engage, I shoot, I leave. This first subject was an MD associated with Middling City U, a dog lover, and we shared political views. She asked about me, she asked if I had met Maureen Dowd. I said Not yet. And I mean it. This woman doc knows Dowd and was suggesting that I do meet her, that she become my mentor of sorts. I have just purchased Are Men Necessary?, her new book, inspired by not only her but a profile of her in VF so this was more fortuitousness in today's numero uno meeting. And, when I explained how her directions via email first landed me in the wrong parking lot and then the wrongo buildingo she asked if I'd ended up at Middling City Morgue. I replied NOOO, but I'd like to. To much concurrent mirth and amazement by numero uno and her colleague. I explained that I've always been intrigued by the MCM, that I had a college photo colleague who made work in there, heads in buckets and that sort of thing. I have no apparent desire to make work of heads in buckets (although I have photographed Buckethead, but that's another story completely) but do have that Mutteresque/Witkinesque thread in me.
Photo subject number two today was a hard case, an arms-crossed crank until I worked my Perfect magique upon him, ending our photo engagement with laughs and such. At one point when I was making images of him, posed in the midst of a complab of sorts, a frat boy shouted out Hey X, what's all this. To which I replied on his behalf... Swimsuit Edition, SI. This kind of shocked my subject. And to that I say Oh, velcro.
Between and around these things were social and shop engagements and at one point I was checking out at a bookstore, minding mine own beeswax when the clerk asked if I'd like any gift receipts. Gift receipts, I questioned back at her, NO, these are all for me - the holidays are not JUST for others. (In keeping with the holiday shopping theory of Yours Truly that one should not forget oneself in the throes of heartfelt and pressurized holiday acquisition. My solemn decree reads as such: Yeah, sure, buy for those others but treat yourself, you deserve it and will enjoy the holidays oso much more when you're in those new duds, having arrived at the holiday soiree having just listened to some shiney new music, spritzed-up with some new fab scent... and the like.)
A parting holiday shot is this.
Every part of the year we should remember, recall our friends, acquaintances, family, helpers, etc. and the faux sense that all is heightened or that the sense of giving is enlarged now is shit. Be generous with your heart and time and money all the time. This is a time of pandemics, war, desultory vibes and no person in your life should be taken for granted. All through the year, not just Now in this fabrication of joy, love, bon vivant espousal.
And with this, I virtually hug You and speed off to a holiday party for writers for the Shiney Happy Mag, the annual throw the freelancer writer tipplers a festive little bone.

Festive bones of Love.

O happy happy, snap-happenstanced day.
A new Johnny Depp movie.
Well, the good news is it hits screens in the Shiney Apple and I know how to get there and the bad side of the news is it will probably not land in the Middling City.
The movie is The Libertine and the good news, again, is that he's in the damned thing, a biopic type of film about 17th C writer/poet/libertine/sex addict John Wilmot (so on-screen imagine he didn't have to think Mynameis Mynameis because it's handily one and the same).
The bad, again, is that like in that thuggish movie about blow he'll get all ugly at the end and word on the street is his character lost and loses his nose via some bad molecules that entered his libertine body.
Chronicler of the times Sam Johnson said he 'blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness.' Let this be a lesson to You. Or a touchstone for some remorse or even still some cause for tales of the ol' glory days.

Libertine love.

Just completed what felt like on-camera therapy, at Home of the Future/Richard Wicka's joint, for his ongoing Five Minute Series.
First off told the story of when the life of Yours Truly felt like a bad reality t.v. show - when the breakup with the X happened, when all came to fortuitous fruition after receiving two emails from a stranger (the Angry Husband) in Cleveland, OH.
Then he presented YT with a list of scenarios and I was to expound if one hit a chord, so to speak. One of my favorite expoundings was about an encounter with an insect and I told of how as a child I was stung repeatedly, how my mother noted that in a playground there could be a group of players and a bee would dive-bomb me.
So, one family car trip, I had a wasp stuck inside the sleeve of my blouse. Which I did not realize until I felt something and hit my shoulder and then was stung and went hysterical.
My mother, turning from the right passenger seat, struck me with an amazing blow to my face, an open-handed slap to assuage my hysteria. It worked. I was stunned and she ripped off my shirt, exposing me and the newly-dead wasp.
The End.
And so much more.
I feel slightly mentally depleted from this Five Minute experience,
now onwards to Kennedy's concert this fine Middling City evening, to hear The Thing at SoundLab. Chilly, frigid SoundLab.
Yours Truly is dressing accordingly - layered beyond belief.

Layers of Love.

After a few rounds of saber-rattling, Yours Truly confronted this holiday, the first of the triad, and at the moment I am on top, perhaps prematurely brandishing my saber in the air, waving it in triumphant loops overhead.
Ran into, amongst others, Bob Stubblebine last night, of Flynn's and BoHo fame. A past regular of my feted and fabled Thanksgiving feast. He queried and I replied that these past two years I have become a spectator of the day rather than an Olympic athlete who prepped and trained for weeks whilst amassing recipes (in addition to what I deemed a tradition, the somewhat godawful ginger candied carrots I made at my first feast fourteen years ago and subjected all others to from then on), getting the work/live space into a suitable dining room situation (replete with two very long rectangular tables side by each to make one fucking huge table) and scrape the photo dust bunnies off the ceiling, making calls, fielding the RSVPs, shopping, cooking, cooking, more cooking, then the big E, then the big C.
E = entertaining/good.
C = cleaning/bad.
I did squeeze in some excellent cooking today for me and Kennedy (before I trek to parents' place and visit and see the fam) as that is what I do. I read the recipes, I imagine, I shop, I slice, I dice, I spice, I serve and eat.
Just spoke to Rio and Ron (again, amongst others) and they are right now en route to Nature. If it was not 23 degrees in the Middling City I might appropriate that idea.
And Thanksgiving can only mean another thing - in two days it is the annual World's Largest Disco, a slopfest of non-stop memory lane hits. Was involved in a burst of emailing a few weeks ago with some North Buffalo fellas about this so-called event as JW,Esq. got all high and Cali mighty critiquing one of the MC's best attributes remaining. I jumped on his e-shit, noting that he is a walking disco narrative, a f/t party boy for certain.
And now, a fable:
It was roughly about a handful of centuries ago that some renegades sans polar fleece braved the Atlantic Ocean and headed out for spices and freedom and fresh air, so to speak.
Upon their journey they might have become hungry and eaten one of their group who perished. They landed. And upon the place they landed, a beach of rocks, they clung to one rock in a style remiscent of the Transcendentalists - deeming this rock, this place, this beach, this new land of spices and such heaven on earth . . . as suddenly an arrow whizzed past one of the group's head and then another whapped into the rock. They called it Plymouth Rock but it should have been called Pilgrim Rock. They did not sail in on the Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria as that's another story. So they were then surrounded by natives in animal skins, who kind of laughed at the newbies in their light woolens and uncomfortable shoes. So they communicate as one does in the throes of travel, all voice and face and hands until they all became pals and feasted together. Actually, the natives did all the cooking. The arrivistes did not dig the maize soup or the newly-slain animal of undetermined origin but they feasted so as not to be rude, or at least they gave off that vibe. Cranberries, a native plant, were on the tables. Time went on. Cities were built, the natives faded out, the maize soup persevered. A meat that nobody particularly adores, turkey, became the representative food of the vague anniversary of the landing. Stuffing, everyone's fav, came later.

Stuffing Love.

Back in whitewashed Middling City, aglow this fine morn with crystalline beauty and that hushed, winter phenom.
Regarding the lack of EuroPosts, as You asked.
In Europe there are opera houses in each small city, coffee to beat the band up with - as they say - in every establishment (including some primo clothing stores), that whole 'We are like so united yet do manage to still have a loathing for at least one ethnic group, especially those trying to be our cabbies, our maids, our benefactors" vibe, and museums and galleries that run exhibitionistic circles around any of those in the MC.
Yet, when it comes to the wi-fi molecules, they are sparse. And when one does find internet service in one's five-star hotel situation one will be charged out the EuroWazoo to use said internet. Like at College Hotel in Amsterdam. 14euros for two hours. And they mean it. And odd deals like if you - oops - log on before 11AM you will be charged the daily rate for the next two hours tops. But if you sign on at 11:01AM you will be speeding along the autobahnnet for 24hours. And 24 hours does not need to be translated into metric. Dig.
So there was a dearth of good internet situs, resulting in the sad lack of Yours Truly even being on the internet. A bad thing. A highly unusual thing.
Now, back in the USofA, with the oddest of presidents repped thusly in the international press, I am back to absorbing up as many wi-fi molecules as I can net into my aura.
Amsterdam was not the Vegas-like sleaze centre I had imagined but a much more (well it is November, fercrissakes) walking and usual cultural city. But here and there you do spot the lusty conventioneers, those men of all ages who are there for the p.o.t., the window shopping.
And jazz sax Peter Brotzmann's art exhib, a dual exhib with jazz drum maniac Han Bennink, stretched into two adjoined buildings, filled every square inch with their sculptural, painterly, collage pieces. The PB I have my eyes locked onto was #18 on his list/prix list, a small abstract blur upon which he outlined in red his right hand. A must.
So all was beyond fab. The usual wonderments of Europe: the oddities, the better food, the champagne, the walking, the art, the design sense that encompasses most things, the trains.
No jet lag.
But here, in the MC, time passes most days more slowly than elsewhere.
Out into the new snow.

New snow love.

Minding my own business, as usual, as You know, I have found myself in Europe once again. To glean information about art, things, people, more art, weather patterns, international canine practice.
I am in Amsterdam with Kennedy for a few as we en route it to Wuppertal Germany (as in not only about Oktoberfest any more, according to the pro-visit-Germany campaign I recently saw in the throes of photographing two German co-eds) to see the art show of Peter Brotzmann. And so much more.
Today my Perfect eyes vaccumed up many a 17th-century canvas, pressure on me to remember and re-remember for Brucey who will have a plethora of canvas-related questions about the repped artists.
Tonight is dining at Fifteen, the joint of famed Britchef Jamie Oliver. The one of slosh it about fame, along the lines of Nigella - that cooking is a sensuous and sloppy sport.
As is Euro custom, the food has all been excellent, inspiring.

Chef Love.

Note to self: do not buy any more Crumpler bags and, despite the snazzy design and price, take the bulky bag in your possession and burn it.
Photographers live out of bags, photogs on the run more so. A bag that is not helpful and well-designed (in essence my pal), deserves punishment.
Speaking of efficiency, I am currently in a shithole of an ersatz cafe in the Middling City suburbs solely because they offer free wi-fi. Wi-fi is a hot commodity in the MC and this fact has bottlenecked situations and thoughts of Blackberries have danced over my head.
I am embarking now to meet with a company about doing technical writing.
Yours Truly is a primo writer but what in hell is technical writing.
Isn't all writing technical.
The way the brain has to connect with its driving adrenaline and engage the muscles of the arms and especially hands while lapping at the pond of Wit. That is technical.
I am technical.
And wasn't that two and a half years at Parsons School of Deployment all about technology.
I am a technologist.
Now get the hell out of my technical way while I scream out of this mediocrity and head into a meeting, feigning benificence and the like.
Tonight is Christy Rupp's opening at BPAC, looking forward to seeing her and what she is tinkering with on paper these fine days.

Love is technical.

Squirrels, radiation, flowers, buds, elevation, altitude.
This is all about hair, not nature. But I'm sure somewhere in their artists' statement or mission statement there is a ramble about nature, power of green, chaos theory, the watery scents blowing from the Hudson into their hair cutting institute windows in warmer months.
I speak of Bumble and Bumble of hair fame, of course.
A woman named Chri (homonym - sounds like the Native tribe) cut my hair and so I asked her about this squirrel thing. It's their special B&B name for the way hair whorls. You know, like how the tulips open. And the radiating business is to avoid corners.
I pointed out to Chri that squirrels in fact have no corners.
She cut, she elevated, she checked and rechecked my squirrel.
To a result that is unshocking, sufficient, best yet - free.
I was a hair model today.
I have been a clothing model and a model of many many things but never one involving squirrels.
Time to head to the loft to a dinner laden with hijinx with Dorota and Jason.

Whorls of Love.

Can You say that You heard an off-coloured joke uttered by a person of the cloth today, in mixed company.
The set-up (of joke, not joke's utterance's setting):
a sauna, some high-powered women with cell phones implanted in their bodies, some errant toilet tissue. You fill in the proverbial blanks.
Well, Yours Truly sure the h-e-double-hockey-weapons can.
How does one know when one is working at a merrily-frenetic level.
When one has several paper coffee empties to and fro.
Last night gig was about cathartic power of dance and dance is one of my favoured things to shoot for the challenge of it, always likened by YT to shooting an unfamiliar sport, anticipating the next big thing.
Went to Dentist today and received a wollop of the caine they use, waning, finally, after five freakin' droolalicious hours. We got to talking, waiting for the caine to work and began talking about the neighborhood that the office is in. Turns out that Dentist et famille live a stone's throw away. I ask if he knows a different pusher of caine, a notorious man, from the very same street we are on. He not only knows this other but rushes out of the room we're in to fetch not one but two high school year books and there in front of me in a flash was that very same.
Moral.
When you use your words you never know not only which way they will lead you but what fun facts you will garner.
Another fun fact.
Minding my own business and shooting a Saturday night gig I am discussing some important political and musical matters with a Middling City musician I've seen about for decades. I see his drummer and, being YT, shout WIPEOUT. They know this about me, that this remains my absolute favoured song. The non-drummer tells me this. Tells me how they made the beginning tones of the song, how it involved a vintage-like amp and the kicking of it and he detailed the innards of this type of amp. Then, enthusiastic and noting my love of fun facts, he gives his own amp a good wack with the toe of his shoe, which then ushers forth the - digthis - opening tones of WIPEOUT.
Life, always full of not only surprises but scads of fun facts.

Big wide fun fact-filled Love.

Mad throes of deadline and pixel management madness with about a dozen gigs and clients and projects floating over my head in addition to the e-meet and e-greet of work online.
This is the specialty of Yours Truly = all of the above and it is my passion.
Thanks for your attention in this matter.
Gave the feral cats some snacks and for that not only are they sated and ecstatic but the good feline karma abounds.
Back from over there, to the east and to the west, a junket of socializing and imaging.
This must be said
Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square PA nearly sent YT into visual overload, complete botanica revelry with orchids of all types and their penned hybrids hanging and not only different variations of water lilies but a platter was unforgettable as well as their silver garden and the realm of fuzzy special grass that Phoebe and I ran out bare feet over and I really pondered rolling horizontally down a small and manmade hillock and sprinting out of there as I'm sure not only the guards and such but the patrons would have been aghast at my complete giving-in to the power of green.
Before entering the buildings I made a kite with Phoebe and Nathaniel and Oliver and it sailed head and shoulders with the others, all of us taking a turn running with the goddamned thing and then getting a bit restless and not caring too very much if our collectively-created kite attacked the others. I ran the kite down into an Edward Scissorhands portion of the grounds and then we lost Nathaniel in one of the topiaries.
All in all the trip was what a trip should be: exhausting, laugh-ridden, hedonistic, unforgettable, artful.
Back to the madness and all things Perfect.

Cross-state/cross-country/cross-platform Love.

Writing this on Karen's b-day, Halloween. Happy b-day to You, KC, out in the land of good music clubs, border food, ersatz cowboys and faux cowgirls, armadillos, and oso much more.
I did the requisite things. I made caramel apples. I roasted pumpkin seeds after eviscerating pumpkins. I scared small children and made them scream as loudly as possible TorT.
This is a good holiday, despite how the neo-evangels and neo-crusaders want to make one and all think it is all pagan and the like. This is a fine holiday as it involves creativity, caramel, masks, mischief (within reason), no gift giving (not counting candies).
Today, and this is truly Perfect, I finally pilgrimaged my way into Mutter Museum, a delightfully rather pell-mell amassment of vitrines of medical oddities, castings of same, lack of sense-making labels, no artsy-fartsy lighting, and a truckload more of medicinal bric-a-brac and inanities, and a stuffed and dusty brown bear, and an oversized colon, and more.
Yeah yeah yeah video taping is oso not allowed. However. Me being me, I checked the surveillance scene, found a very handy cul-de-sac in the Lewis and Clark display for readying the digvid and ya-fuckin-hoo away I went, wending my way through high school loudmouths to shoot a gorgeous angular sight I had predetermined - a tapeworm folded over neatly on him/herself or it, perhaps, in vitrine, just past a hand of skeleton wired bone and just beyond the gaggles of thrill-seeking teens. A triumph. And then I got the vitrine of brains of epileptics and the Akin & Ludwig and Witkin-famed face. Oh, what an art day. A day of resolute, no holds barred, and let's slide our ass down the marble bannister for good measure day.

Mutter Love.





ps: I heard there existed this image online, of Yours Truly working the Colin Powell hoopla. Do I own a crimson blazer. No. This blazer is actually burgundy. Do not color calibrate your monitors. Thanks for your attention in this matter.

So there Yours Truly is, truly, minding her own perfect business.
Let us regale in the present tense, for dramatic effect. As dramatic, shall we say, as Nor'Easterly Blazing Tree Glory.
I am waiting for Scott, for a so-called band meeting for our excellent-to-be band, Knife Call. We have all, as I have written previously, together except for my musical contribution. So we are meeting to view and review some software for digmusicmaking.
Scott is late. Scott is a real musician so time is never a critical factor for him, for his planning.
While I wait I talk to Jeremy, one of my favoured bar people.
I note that across the way, a mere, oh, ten feet away, is a person I worked with at the Middling City alternapaper. He was the art guy. I was the photo gal. He was there maybe a year or so. I was there for fifteen. He's a Brit, he likes to be in his cups. He comes over, normal sort of socializing behaviour. We converse for a while, well, until my so-called bandmate, errant and time-shrugging Scott, arrives. Cupman tells me that he is back in the MC for work, that he's actually been gone, in that city that just won that hardball thing, for a few years and will be a regular feature, assuming all goes swimmingly and such.
So, now that my bandmate is here I pronounce we are about to conduct a meeting, waving over at a table nearby with requisite and handy outlet. Cue to end convo. Cut to end of convo.
The former co-worker says to Perfect me this, thusly, trepidatiously:
You know, Nancy, you were one of the people I was really dreading seeing back in this city. I am flabbergasted as I abso-freakin-lootly didn't relate to how he described my c-word attitude towards him at several social functions. I attributed it to perhaps his paranoia.
But then, today, I recalled:
Cupman was at one of my truly delicious fetes and he became quite very amazingly unruly and I recall sort of booting him out. This was several years ago and I think the kickout scene may have involved broken glass, flames, skullduggery.
Anyhow, mystery solved, sort of.
But, really, how could anyone in their right mind loathe seeing Yours Truly, belle of every single ball and then some.

Love belle love ball.

An uncensored glimpse into conceptions of painters known, studied and/or admired by Yours Truly. Or why YT usually prefers the company, conversation and art of photogs.
Painters are a quirky bunch and are manytimes planted stubbornly on the introverted quadrant of the chart of personalities that I am looking at right this very instant, (well a representation of same) scrawled on a shabby piece of paper outlining how me and one of my X's were never going to work out (and, by golly, he was like so right) as I was in one quadrant, he in the other. I see that he, I forgot this, put me in the same quadrant as Bill Clinton. I am good with that. I think, looking at this scrawl, he put himself in a box with Tolkien. Or maybe that is John Wolffer. Who in hell is John Wolffer.
Anyhoo.
Painters fret too much. Whereas a photog, or a group of photogs, gets down/off on chaos, good old-fashioned adrenaline, extreme physical feats and geeking on equipment, painters are all into organizing studios, getting the light right, nay, perfect, being solo, being in control, making just the right swerve. And for all this Fret there are so few grand painters, those whose canvases or boards whap you upside the head.
Photography just simply rocks.
So, why am I jurying a painting show in January.
Well, I will tell You.
A painter thought I'd, as a photog, be a good judge of what sucks and what does not.
I said I am honoured.
And, really, I am.
Perhaps during the opening reception, amidst all the cheese cubes and white wine in plastic cup swilling, I will expound further upon my Painter v. Photographer special thoughts.
Until then.

Cheese cubes of love.

Breezing about on the ol' PowerBook I chanced upon this image and Yours Truly cannot at all recall if this has been posted before and if it has not then why not and so then here it is in all its ironic glory. This is from a pow-wow, a real freakin' pow-wow-wow, outside the Middling City in some hillock-strewn landscape and this image post is inspired by the NPR story today deriding fry bread, mainstay of Native Americans, focus group of pow-wows. In this NPR snippet of life I learned that frybread is so not a native Native dish, but a culinary/nutritional disaster made from surplus ingredients handed over to the natives by the government of this country. Remember, do You remember, the newsbits about twenty or whatever years ago that crack was the white man government ploy to kill off the inner-city yutes of colour. Well, Yours Truly is reading between earnest NPR docket lines and seeing a ploy to harm the natives who are now 70% diabetic, about same rate for obesity and frybread has a lot to do with this. Now, look at this image. The bear has no eyes, they are dried slits for the bear is deader than a proverbial doorknob.

Proverbial Love.

Minding my own business, driving back to the home office hovel, had a conflation of visual imagery, a collage of sorts that was delightfully confusing. Such a bonus to one who slings not hash but images, in this over-imaged universe - a virtual sea of sights.
Driving down one Middling City avenue, Jefferson, to be exact, I look up to see a set of those iconic golden arches. As we all know the season is autumn and Halloween is pressing upon our sensibilities. I look to the left and see two women exiting a building, one woman in a golden pirate hat. At second glance I realize that she is exiting an ancient church, that her pirate's hat is, in actuality, a Sunday chapeau.

Misconstrued visuals Love.

Been gathering objets d'arts, or rather devenir art, things like little odd metal pieces and perfect little green crabapples, for art's sake. Still trying to reclaim art life after art school. My mantra of Art is supposed to be fun helped me get over, somewhat gracefully, thesis deadline hurdles but now it's time to forage on to works on paper, ideas in head, images on paper, items under hot lights, art under glass.
Got an email from Rio that she's giving up her long and lovely and straight hair for the charity that makes wigs for children with cancer. Of course lovely Rio is making such a gesture with her hair.
I am supposed to be succumbing to someone's whimsy at a hair school some time next month. Hair is only hair. It grows. It turns, with a lot of help, from primary red to normal after one's pal's experiment, guided foray into hair weirdness, runs amok and then fades out to further oddness of colour.
Today is a gray Middling City day, typical of later autumn.
I do not have more than a few gray hairs, despite my tribulations, and thanks to Gramma Vickie's excellent hair genes.
Today is a wet Middling City day.
Do not leave the house in cold weather with cold and wet hair for you will be inviting sickness to land upon your head and crawl down the back of your neck, lodging itself in your lungs for an indeterminate amount of time.
Next hair/health/weather question, please.

Chestnut hairballs of chestnuts and wisdom Love.

Just returned from the Liz Phair Extravaganza featuring her, her pretty guitars, her nice boots, band of Scruffian boys, and some odd onstage lights that looked like supersized Ikea items. Deb took me, Katherine, and Karen to the gig and we were to be seated in row G but, upon seeing the empty spaces, I insisted that we move into the front row, center, which we did. What did I learn at this show. That her new songs, like her old ones, are fine poetry that appeals to bandguys as much as earnest girlies and art types.
Before that made some images of the nouveau China art shows at Middling City U's two galleries and one of the moments at the suburban gallery was a performance featuring a woman artiste, sitting in a shopping cart putting on makeup while wearing a wedding gown as eight men in collars & leashes pulled towards their individual cupcake before them on the floor. The strongest neck and larnyx which reached his treat was performistically rewarded with the bride. I got some shots of one puller in particular who looked like his temples were going to explode blood all over the terrazzolike floor.
The cat is angry about the annual turn of the weather, angry at me as if I planned this to irk him in some way. He gets quite vocal in the autumn and this does not wane until spring's melty goodness.

Melty good love.

As is my wont, in the midst of turbo-powered deadlines breezed through Blogville to see what others are up to and located this must-see: go here for a neato-gleato treat.

Boom Love Box.

Did the Greg Sterlace Show (Yours Truly uses that term ultimately loosely) last night, arriving for taping and waiting a long while for some stoner musicians to show up - their band name was . . . Dyspepsia, no, Dysorg, no, it was Dystopia or Dysmorphic. It was a duo and they brought along their pal, Snake, a very Guns 'n Roses-lookin' dude with aviator shades and bandanna who said very little. I refer to him during the taping at one point as the show's potted plant. I did, most importantly, get a chance to do my famed rock jump during the band's "performance," over the top of the percussionist's head. Annie Deck showed up so she appears in the group photos, next to me for some. Oh, and Bad Ronald and I renewed our vows and the attorney who married us on the GSS a few years back couldn't make it so Greg did the honors. Standing in the background for that moment was a guy named Jim who showed up in a tricked-out suit fabricated from some classic PlayBoy fabric. His shoes were a rollicking shade of Pepto pink. All in all, the usual mayhem. After, headed out with Annie and met up with her brother Tom at Hardware where there was actually good live music warbling throught the convivial molecules.

Love conviviality.

Began the day just post asscrack of dawn and drove out to Middling City U where Yours Truly had an odd conversation with a student receptionist with listening comprehension issues. Apparently all the staff was in a meeting or vaporized and I was awaiting the arrival of my photo subject, a man who works at a top-secret defense contracting site associated with the U. As I am waiting and dropping off work for one who works at the desolate Friday office, I make some chat with the hearing impaired girl who, I am gathering, is probably a gigantic follower of all things sci-fi. Why, You may ask, is that my deducement of her. It had to do with her aerospace engineering studies, her manner of speaking, her sci-fi-looking shirt that would fit into any movie which outfits the femmes aboard a celestial ship of sorts in concurrently fetching (read revealing) yet sturdy and work-ready wear. So we're talking as the man/subject is late and then later yet. She says she's going on to grad studies in all things aerospace and so YT states Oh, you're done. Well, nearly done. She is squinting her eyes. WHAT, she replies. You are done, well, nearly done. Repeat exchange once more. Then I realize that she thinks I've called her dumb so I re-say You are nearly finished. She gets this.
The man arrives.
I have been warned that he's been hard to agree to being photographed, harder to schedule. This shoot was arranged by one of my editors so I only just found this all out yesterday.
He is sweaty and apologizing and says he could not find the building.
I suggest we leave this building and expect an argument but YT has gracefully pointed out that we will have a better time of portrait-making elsewhere. I give the nouveau location and off we speed. He is then late and then later still at the other spot.
I think he's pulled an archetypal male move of not saying he does not know how to get to this new destination. A car pulls up and it's not him.
Ten minutes drift along and then he arrives, saying he ran into someone he knew in the parking lot.
So we're making small talk as I photograph him and he goes into a rant about how his business is super-secret and that he's jetting off a lot to lobby in Washington and we discuss airports. Then he returns to ranting about how the Middling City Daily has misquoted him severely four times and the whole time I'm shooting away, offering some compositional strategies and thinking Uhh, okay, I'll be certain not to misquote you in any photo captions, Mr. Secret.
He wants a jpeg sent to him to prove to some of his colleagues far away that it's not always snowing in the Middling City and then I suggest we do a few portraits outdoors. He declines.
So, I'm thinking Wow, Mr. Secret is kind of kooky for how in h-e-double-hockey-sticks are some images of him standing inside a very neutral building with some very natural and pleasing window light going to prove a damned thing about weather maps in this region.
Moral:
You may be a lobbying scientist but that does not make you a MapQuest or Art scholar.

Scholarly Love.

Hearing this soundbite from unsound GWB yesterday on NPR I thought I'd e-fetch this quote, brushoffalicious and diabolical, regarding the press pressing on about the background of the next possible Supreme Court appointee.

"People are interested to know why I picked Harriet Miers,'' [President Bush]; said. "They want to know Harriet Miers' background. They want to know as much as they possibly can before they form opinions. Part of Harriet Miers' life is her religion.''

With logic akimbo, sidesteppingly the President answers nothing. So, as an exercise, is some self-MadLibbing below:

'Blog readers are interested to know why I picked Nancy J. Parisi,' Yours Truly said. 'Middling Cityites want to know My Perfect sport utility wagon. They belch to know as much as they possibly can before they form monkeys. Part of Yours Truly's perfection is her Oban.'

MadLibbin' Love.

Live and clean forget from day to day,
Mop life up as fast as it dribbles away.

-Sam Beckett, from
Collected Poems in English & French

Some birthday wizened words from the Sam, this emergence anniversary after picking up the niece and nephew and quote unquote kidnapping them for a sojourn to the avenue for some caffeine, sugar, cd's, rollicking hijinx before returning them to their more steady advisors and handlers. Time to head out with Kennedy and then points beyond.

Wise Love.

John Lennon's birthdate. Today.

Yoko always suggests to remember the beginning, not the ending.
Ending time is near, the garden the yellowed green and withered leaves and bees searching for the last pollen morsels, and the Middling City sky turning its customary Autumnal Gray.
Tomorrow is my own day of reckoning and it's usually a day I work and sort through matters but tomorrow I'm holding off on work, à la Day of Rest, for a change. Brucey observed that I have a hard time with the 10/10 and to that I said It's one's own special private New Year's Eve, in a way, a time to assess the highs, the lows, the plan of action, the bell curves, and pie charts. Yours Truly also believes a person's b-day is, if you care, love, like a person, a time to say Hey, you came out into the world and yafuckinhoo to that. Belated Happy B-day to JW,Esq., who, I am certain, spent his special day body-painted and addled in some club after hanging up the BBsuit. Tomorrow is also Katharine's date of birth, the niece, who plopped onto the scene on the 10/10.
So yesterday was Marty and Susan's wedding day and in lieu of being there in a cute black ensemble amongst some of my most favoured people and giving a reading penned by YT, I was a hired camera at a wedding of near-strangers who booked me over a year ago. And I did her sister's wedding and there was no way in h.e.l.l. I could say Oh, oops, sorry, I won't be there. So there I was. Encountered the sociopathic priest at Saint Weirdo's, I'm sure I blogged about him at last year's wedding of the sister of yesterday's bride. He didn't perform the ceremony yesterday but there were stories about him from the rehearsal run-through, of him pronouncing that there would be no alcohol, cigarettes, shenanigans on the premises of Saint Weirdo's. Nothing of the sort. So he's nowhere to be seen, whew, but then, during the formal fam photos in the church he appeared. He, as is his wont, approached me discreetly and mustered up in a most astonishing hate-filled and passive-aggressive stylee This is NOT a photo studio . . . you have TWENTY minutes. I informed one and all. Then I requested that the couple stick around with me when we were done, they had asked if I needed anything and I said Yes, please wait with me while I break this all down, last year this priest waited until everyone had left and came from God knows where to harngue me and scared me a bit. So they did, and, lo & behold, Father Creepo appeared and, when seeing that I was not alone, sort of disappeared again. Thwarted.
At the reception I was seated for dinner between the d.j. and a retired, 80-year old cop. After several attempts to ask the retiree about his former career as cop and boxer I gave up, his suspiciousness from years on the beat preventing me from hearing some good tales, I asked Andy the d.j. about his side job as a d.j. at a Middling City strip joint. Far more interesting, and rewarding. Now teeming with fun facts about the dancers, percentages, strategies, etc.
YT does have a priviledged purview of an enthralling cross-section of an odd assembly of people on any given week.
On that positive tale-rich note I end.

Love of rich tales.

At last evening's gig was seated for dinner, between two music types, one wearing his Africaner tie of jazzy hues. Someone at Table 10 commented on the tie and he quipped that this tie was responsible for thee Hillary Clinton going all woozy at the luncheon You might recall this past winter in the Middling City, when her eminence passed out c.o.l.d. and The Globe, with giant photo (pre-skid-hitting) of same by Yours Truly queried thusly: WAS HILLARY POISONED.
Well, in the mind of this music type he and his tie did it. I do have an image of him greeting HC at the door, her hand outstretched for him and the tie is there. There was a movie and/or t.v. star who I did not recognize, I thought him to be another grad student being trotted out to impress the major Middling City U donors, a look-see visual aid. But, no, this was a living, breathing, smiling widely movie/t.v. star who I could not have named, fingered in any event to save my precious, perfect life. So, being YT, once I did learn of his pending bronze star in Hollywood I jumped on the op to photograph him merrily, even posing him with a few people in the room who did know him. And this is not the sort of image that, say, my pal at The Enquirer would salivate over. Now, had he choked on the extra-brut chicken on plate, that would have been a, what we call in the trade, windfall.

Love windfalls.

Love Post.
If the title is too much, please do scamper now.
No time for non-Bryan Ferry-luvvin' fairies at this juncture. More than this.
The weekly therapist/mixologist Jeremy says Nancy, do you recall a morning at X. I say Yes, I do, regaling him with his own self-made details. They include a girl I do not know and Jeremy carefully purchasing a mug, a thing, a gift. I ask Do you LOVE the girl and he - sadly - balks. This boy I pegged as human, as genuine, as Real, as It All. He says I have said It but I don't know if I mean It. Plunging toward sad I ask Then why say and he say c o n v e n t i o n. Which leads me to the next scene of my lifemovie when I am driving aimlessly without a real home towards wherever and sobbing - the last time - for him. Concurrently, writing the first airy draft of a poem called same, the last time I cried for you and it's sad, sweet and liberating as it's - get it - the last fuckin' time. The last time a person can touch you somehow with words, memories, or remnants.

One of yesterday's gigs was to make some ports of a Middling City suburb political type, running for (and from) only God, voters, party planners may know.
So I show up at party h.q. and there he is, one of his brochures sticking out of his shirt pocket. This was there on purpose. I know, I asked.
He balked when I said I'd like to have his assistant (with my assistance) tape one of his larger signs to the wall - for a thrill, for a prop.
I wanted to shake him firmly by the shoulders and say this
Look, X, you stick to what you know. And I'll do what I know best. You stand there and look political, no art directing. End of orders.
So all worked out swimmingly, him finally succumbing to the art direction of Yours Truly most perfectly.
Time to press on with deadlines and hit the highway for two back-to-back jobs making all in front of the d2x look beautiful, pensive, pixel-worthy.

Pixel-worthiness of Love.

Not to be like so totally biting on OnlyInNewYorkKids,OnlyInNewYork fame - Liz Smith - but the fabulosic newbie to the eating and see-and-be-seen scene Freeman's has this majorly fun fact attached to it. Apparently those wretched Bush twin girls tried to sup & sip there and, noting their wide and over-priviledged faces. the hostess, when asked by one of the twins (who knows if it was the fat one named for that one grandmother, or the dumber-looking one, named for the other) how long of a wait it could/would be (after the furtherance of their stance at front of line was not helped one teensy schmeensy bit by their surname, which they brandished like a truncheon) were told Four years. Only in the Shiney Apple could a hostess come up with such a superb utterance as she was probably also a writer of some sort, or a comedienne, or a diplomat.
Speaking of such, had to shoot a Canadian dip today with the prez of Middling City U. And I thought how easy it was to spot him amongst the MC bunch. It harkened back to the wine centre/vintner joint up in Fort Erie somewhere where, like the Mainland Chinese, suddenly it is noted that the humbleness of yore is more yore than before.
Overheard on the streets of SoHo: uttered by a guy with a curly mullet who, it was quite obvious, thought himself an eminent metrosexual type was, him walking quickly and speaking in a gush over his shoulder to three people behind him New Yorrrrk is like mental Ritalin, so perfect for someone like me.
I mean really.
Flew back to Middling City in an inward snit and sat next to a small dog (half chihuahua and half terrier... a good mix) who popped out of his bag, first staring at me and then offering me some languid kisses and his handler, a lesbian sex worker.
We spoke and then came the certain tone of voice asking if I do portraits. As I told Kennedy this conversation has happened countless times, it's sort of along the lines of the invariable male who asks Are you the OFFISHull photographer. She needed a Bunny Yeager and I was like so not into being her Bunny Yeager. Onwards.
Yesterday's shower for Susan was good old-fashioned all-girl throwdown with the usual bunch of girlies and ruffians. I won a prize, a door prize - a shopping bag of things that smell good and then a femme won a bag chock full of Ani merch (hostess Mary works for RBR and the lil' folksinger . . . Laura is right now barfing on the floor wherever she is) and gave me the tiny girlie tshirt she knew I would fit into and she would never. A bonus. A bonus in this Perfect world.
There are exactly seven shopping days until the birthdate of Yours Truly.
Fav colour: green
Shoe size: 7
Ring size: 6.5
Hat size: who the fuck knows and don't buy me a hat.
Fav restaurant: Gotham
Fav scotch: Oban
Look, this is enough to get You started. Happy freakin' shopping.

HFS Love.

Minding my own business, as per usual, ran into a Parsons School of Debonairity grad of second class (as opposed to the premier class, the class just spewed back into the harsh reality of the world, i.e. Mine) at the Sugimoto show at Japan Society.
Two wows: 1. Serendiptity. 2. Show.
His seascapes and waxwork viewing boxes are there as well as a hardcore fossil collection, his thoughts on fossils and photography (Photographs are fossils of the present.), and some Japanese antiquities shown as they are right now and some with his photographs fused into what they are. It's shadowy, poetic, surprising and the only factor that is a minus are the overly-vigilant guards who must have taken a lead from the obsessive watchers of The Whitney. They don't serve sake or tea in the joint which has always made me want to find the director and ask Why. Ate dinner at a new joint off an alley off Rivington off Bowery. Freeman's. It like so totally rocks and there was consumption, amongst others, of those little UK morsels Devils on Horseback. I mean, really, what is there not to like about a morsel with such a name. Another bonus thing is the smiling head of a wild boar looming over diners. Other taxidermied former fauna include a geese with feet out, appearing to be about to crash land upon a table for a feast. Not him.
Speaking of morsels, Yours Truly has been making visual morsels. And like Devils on Horseback they rock. Perhaps my next show will be called same.
Faithfully sticking to the fun facts, the high times, the misdemeanours, I end.

Love morsels.

OK, this is truly truly horrifiying.
Somehow, and I reiterate Some... how... some radio station was on and I was minding my own stinkin' business and then they were playing BILLY JOEL AND IT WAS REALLY BAD, AS USUAL, BUT I MEAN I REALLY DO LOVE TO HATE THAT LOSER BUT REALLY . . . DID YOURS TRULY NEED - EVER - TO HEAR youmustberightImustbecrazy ON MY HI-FI. No, the answer is no, no, never, no.
Onwards to more Smog. Oh yeah and all is good in Perfect Nancy's World once more.
An I Really Hate Billy Joel Story:
(god there are so many, where to glean)
He is about to go onstage in a Middling City arena. As is his custom he has his handlers basically shake all us photogs down. No this, no that. As if.
He comes astage and is promptly teleprompted, the screen facing him atop his piano, his chubby little fingers working away on his tunes.
That's enough for now.
Shudder.
Jetting tomorrow to the right side of the state and have sent out appropriate warnings and such. Jubilantly, I discovered a credit with the company that became for years my school bus, my networking tool, my saving planular grace.
Off I go to make art. I am so very happy to be on the brink of tossing myself into my ideas.
And the rest of it.

Rest, no, never love.

Well, well well, well well well.
Firstly,
minding my own business at one of last evening's photographically opportunistic gigs, a private all-femme high school reunification, I was smiled at by a woman proudly wearing her clipped-out portrait from thirty years hence, not sure if she knew me or not as the room was only full of this class as well as a few waitresses filling chafing dishes with chafing waters. I was there to wrangle all of the amassed into a portrait = a pending summer Olympic sport, and more fun to watch than ribbon dancing to boot.
I though OK, she knows me so I says my name and she says in an odd voice OhMyGodYouLookGreat whilst hugging me.
I then realized she had no idea who I was and thought of telling her I was merely the hired hand photog but let her swim in her case of mistaken identity as, You know, sometimes it is just so not worth the price of admission to get into details.
This fine morn gig was a race and the road crew included a group of Middling City U students all decked out in the decade of their births - the 80s - all grooving on the tackier edge of those mauve and teal-infused, teased, bisexualized times. The group of them, about half a dozen, came to shepherd runners dressed as an 80s band and they were outfitted well and accompanied by a vintage boombox blaring Journey. A few of them gleefully asked if I was down with Journey and I assured them I was. Then they also gleefully showed me their vintage cassette tape, a holy rock relic of sorts. Who can forget the new mode, compact disc, when some of us owned but a few and we thought it could be a passing fancy, reading audiophile articles that they would be a flash, a lower-rez version that would be outpaced soon(er than later) - but no.
Haunted by a Chaos song heard on the radio, finally something new to get auditorially hepped for. Bought the last Smog. A gem.

Smoggy Love.