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.