More green.

Yours Truly meant to add a really great Accidental Frame from the series but there is either a Java issue - again - as YT upgraded FireFox to the newest miasma, or it's the toxic tech-defying droplets on my fingertips that are keeping this verdant jpeg from appearing as it should be: as verdant as can be in the upper lefthand corner of epinw with a quippy caption basically stating that it's an accidental frame, and that it's verdant.

It was made while in the woods with a guy who I was hired to make portraits of, who is going on some far-flung trek to raise money. It's like an Uta Barth image, made somewhere between what is there and infinity: it shows green layers of new leaves in the early morning before I literally and figuratively was focused on the subject at hand.

Whilst shooting and conversing I asked this photo victim if he had been a camp counselor, and he had. I told him that I'd spent a decade in Maine as a camp counselor, how I can sometimes spot other camp counselors: no matter how much orange-bottled Ben's is sprayed & removed, years passed, or layers of crud added and subtracted, there is a wholesome aura that clings much like those auras of others of similar good intent.

It was in that instant that YT realized just how much I miss Maine, and kayaking, and being outdoors in those cold dark nights in the woods for best dreaming, and pine-stenched days for solid writing and Art.

A dream recently won't leave the other hours, it was so real that it has achieved the rarefied status of only about a few dozen of dreams across this lifetime that remain as real as photographs. Spring is the time of poetry, of memories, of memories of walks at night beginning poems in sketch form, of the turning of a corner and the arresting scents of night-blooming jasmine or hyacinths. Curtains blowing out a window, then into the room as Love looms large.

Love Looming. Love Dreaming.

The Call of the Drawing Board

Accidental Frame Series: Carpet and Black Shoe. 4.27.11

Yet another masterwork crafted - hand-pixelled if You will - by Yours Truly whilst minding my own business yesterday evening mid-gig and talking with two app developers - and brainstorming, as they say in the world of apps and such.
Another of the Accidental Frame Series, I like the subconscious nod to letters and stamps.
Or perhaps You anarchists see a backward American flag.
In that ref you would be far-off from the intent of my subconscious.
YT handed in a blaring/glaring soothful resto review of one of the Middling City's most earnest establishments which will not be named.
As their director (his term) of food (like elsewhere he would be dubbed the manager) and drink was enormous and imposing YT puts this out there so that if I should disappear without any clues on epinw, or FB, or tweets, or texts, or classy note taped to a busy wall of my house, You know that I am wearing concrete loafers at the bottom of the dark and mysterious Lake Erie.
The resto in question liked to use the term hand-whatever'd.
Lots of menu items there are hand-crafted, hand-tossed, hand-fashioned.
I added the latter.
What in h-e-double-hockey-sticks food is not given life by some human hands.
I move along to other matters at hand-craft.
YT is embroiled in Art, more Art, and a smattering of other creative matters.
YT also found herself in the confusing, and China-handed aisles of IKEA yesterday and bought some really swell frames that seemed like they were secretly customized for YT and YT artwork.
Or hand-tousled Art pieces.
YT should like to state thusly: what was remembered as charmingly low-fi in terms of the onsite resto was to YT yesterday rather dumpish.
As is the custom in Canada the creamer for the coffee was stellar.
The meatballs were worthy of Salvatore's Italian Wax Museum, and quite similar in tone. YT did not eat them, only examined them with palpable superiority.
The crepes were lunchable. They had the air of hand-tossing.
Off now to march about and create some fine things for public enjoyment.
Tomorrow YT rises bright and shining to watch those far-off nuptials for some reason.
YT watched the handing over of Hong Kong, and before that that unfortunate alignment of Diana and Whatzizname.
O Trad.

Love of Hand-Crafted Trad.

Perfect Circle.

Yours Truly happily finds herself entrenched in a surprisingly creative, or somewhat (daresaid) inspired moment - post-gig (with sweat drying), in the somewhat silence of the Sanctuary, with one wish that Perfect Circle could stretch into a two-hour tune rather than its just-over-three-minute version to float in the lyrics of this song discovered that one fateful afternoon whilst writing in the meagerly-tatami'd apartment in Itabashi-Ku, Tokyo, when YT played it for hours on a modest tape player while sitting on the tatami and typing some good words.

O, what did those silent neighbors think of the repeats on their sides of the bug-ridden studio walls replete with communal benjo so foul that we oftentimes opted to take nighttime pees in the park just across the walkway rather than use it, wrapped in a nylon winter jacket of a previous tenant, perhaps that verysame tape-leaver. YT does recall how the stench of the benjo would remain in my hair after using it - a cistern, let us not hide behind our Nippon vocab. Our Japanese acquaintances were embarrassed when we told them that we had a place with a benjo, so we stopped saying so. The happiest of discoveries was on a homemade cassette in a left-behind box of tapes of a friend of the tenant, my then-beau. A man whose heart I broke and I am still sorry for that. Not sure if that is sorry, or very sorry. Perhaps it is fleeting-thought sorry.

Then-beaus, beaus, and future beaus is that which springs eternal in thought when it is becoming the fairest of malleable, clime-shifting times of the year. When the Middling City is between gray and green intensities, the air sprung with the scent of warming earth, and moistness in the air from mud, heavy clouds, and emerging.

It is that time to focus on the new work for the next solo marathon, the drawings, and the images that have been sketched and that now need to be made into pixels and so forth.

This show is entitled Lost In It, inspired by Great Lake Swimmers, this time. John has been the inspiration of the last three shows. This is how YT pays deft and silent homage to some of those who engulf.

It was one week ago that YT went to the memorial service for Mary Tomaselli, a pure and dear soul who had an incredible gift of entrepreneurial focus, and one of the most celestial of gifts - hospitality. As expected, Asbury Hall was crowded with those who loved her. I will always be grateful that YT was able to spend amazing time with Mary, and my parents (et al) in Sicily. It was one of those precious moments when in it you realize how precious it is, how the ending is dreaded, how Life is sipped with hunger, with renewed fascination and Joy.

Hopes for more thoughts on fire, crocuses blooming in clumps in the matted grass of last year, more intense moments of face-to-face laughter, of unforgettable touches of fingers, of songs that arrest time, of souls released and floating in that languid whiteness that YT saw that time, more Joy than sorrow, Art that embeds, words that reach into what Love is.

Perfect, Encirclement of Love, Love.

Deluded in the Suburbs

There was Yours Truly minding business.
Whose business, You don't even have to ask.
Mine own business.
As is my wont.
Age-old wont.

Having had brunch in the wizened and woody Roycroft with Annie, decided to take a sunny walk in the East Auroran neighborhood, and head up and over to the wacky Vidler's where one can find do-dads, toys, new things that look age-old, and things that are rather extinct but were in the purses of grandmothers. Like disposable rain helmets, as YT likes to call plastic rain bonnets of yore.

Before Vidler's we fell for an age-old lure for femmes, signage proclaiming a big sale on shoes.
Sixty percent.
Palpitations.
We did the expected and sensible thing and trundled into a shop that was one of those multi-layered and colorful shops that confuse men but make sense to ladies.
Hats, boots, shoes, more accessories, jewelry, signage, fluffy sofa to sit on, curling paths through displays that scream abundance and fun and fashion and party girl.

In the midst of all of this at first glance was a girl who seemed to fit into the scene, in ill-fitting bright pink wig, with cheap faux Ray Bans, in loose track suit over her less-than-lean body.
She was speaking, despite her young age, as if she were a partially-deaf and much older lady so that all in the festive and overly-festooned shoppe could hear it all.

Murmurings of Nikki Minaj, travel floated in the air and apparently the girl was living in the midst of a frustrating whirlwind. People could not be reached. She was on hold. On hold. Thirty more seconds of unavoidable overhearing revealed this young woman to be living in a delusion, a self-produced reality television show.

The harried woman running the shoppe for her boss came up to me when she noted my facial expression, recognizing an empathetic person in her midst. She's (eyes glancing over toward the MTV-ready monologue) been in here since I opened two hours ago, I can't get rid of her.

The delusional and pink-headed one claimed to be the lover of ultra-busty R&B lovely Nikki Minaj, meant perhaps for shock value in this town noted for its conservative mores. She was in this town stopping by, before going up to Niagara Falls (about 35 miles away) to pick up her stuff before jetting off to the Shiney Apple to help Nikki Minaj her lover shop for some clothes.

Make it big, baby, is what I always tell her, said the deluded girl. Then she asked the shopgirl for some papers upon which she could sign her autograph. She posed with two tweens who seemed confused or pleased or perhaps a little frightened of the girl in the pink hair. They were heard to be posing with Nikki's lover, and she asked them to put the image up on Facebook.

As we left the shoppe I glanced down at an autograph in-situ - it was on a scrap of a shopping bag and in one-inch black Sharpie letters I was able to read the word Love.

And later, after a sneezing fit in Vidler's, we passed her on the street as she was half-singing to herself. I asked Annie if we should pretend to recognize her and ask her for her autograph. As we chuckled as we passed she exclaimed Hey ladies keep on smiling, you are so beautiful - do you know how many people a day I make happy.

Delusional Love.

Wilting and Fragrant Pinching

I am in Bergen giving a workshop.
We just wrote an exquisite corpse poem which I will post later.

Hyacinth Juice, Inspiration, Blue

Hyacinth Juice, 2011 ©Nancy J. Parisi

Off to Peep Show, a somewhat-annual fundraising fete, at the big early 20th-century box that appears as if would be at home on the Shiney Apple's Park Avenue instead of the bereft Genesee Street where it is near Jefferson Avenue which is itself devoid of its past, and filling up with new plastic houses which many in the Middling City tout as progress.

As is my wont, YT has created another fun-filled and money-raising instant photo installation - Café Complicated as the theme of this Peep Show is It's Complicated.

I made two oversized to-go paper coffee cups in coffee with creme brown (read: cardboard) and with white tops emulating the toxic white plastic that YT sips from each and every happy day.

sidebar: A friend of YT asked what indeed happened to Stevie Wonder, who was truly wondrous up through the late 70s. 

Paul McCartney, YT stated in assured tones.

For indeed it is the truth.

When McCartney got his lyrics and smarm all over Stevie we see what happened: Ebony and Ivory.

I rest my case.

Onwards.

So Peep Show is about 5 minutes away as is my destination - it was requested of artists to be there for the pre-Peep Peep so it makes for one long night indeed. My helper, Shewwy, will arrive at about 8 and we will sell little wee instant photos (Fuji photos, not Polaroids) for $5 each in adorable little folders.

People/participants/patrons may select from several tags that they will use to tag their cups: things that may define them or their secret selves. 

One fav is one created by Heady: Drunkalatte, sure to be a top seller.

Time to make and do, do, and do.

Creating Love.