Image courtesy of artchive.com

A whopping 33″ x 44″ print of Aubrey Beardsley’s The Ascension of Saint Rose of Lima has been snubbing its sarcastic little nose at me from its spot in my sister’s hallway since the fateful day a few years ago when my normally equitable thrifter & gifter of a mum brought it to her and to me a(nother) book on Frieda Kahlo.  I’m not sure whether it was her failure to recognise it as a Beardsley print, my sister’s then recent interest in furnishing her home with art, spite, or an early onset of senility which caused this grievous error but the print was clearly meant to go to the sister who does recognise & appreciate Beardsley’s work in all of its saucy glory (that sister being me, of course - I’ve had the limerick which goes with that particular illustration off by heart since I was 16 and believe me, it’s a fun one to pull out in mixed company) and the book to the sister who clearly needs to broaden her knowledge of Frieda’s life and who doesn’t already own 3 books on the matter.  I’ve been pissing and moaning about this for 3 years.  Until now that is.  Now it’s in my living room waiting to be hung because I, being the opportunist that I am, saw an opening to cut an underhandedly shadey deal with my sister which landed me the painting and her a bare hallway wall.  I have no shame.  The print is mine.  Mine mine mine mine mine.

So yesterday was a little more than a little surreal given that it started with putting to bed a two-day long semantic argument with a wholesaler (which I think I won) then a surprise drop-in from a dear friend from London.  Much time was spent on the front porch, catching up, drinking beer & taking photographs of peonies inspired by these lovely works by Kari Herer:

Hers - courtesy of her etsy store which you should check out and buy some stuff from.

My not-nearly-as-moody-or-arty peonies.

The daughter gave me shit for snipping a couple (only 2!) on the basis that they ‘better left in nature.’  Screw that; they’re my peonies and it’s my prerogative.

And an obligatory (still in nature) ant pic because ants love peonies and I love all things buggy.

The surrealities came when we were visited by a door-to-door star salesman (which I could try to explain but it would get long and sordid and I’d rather just leave that up to your imaginations - we did buy stars, though, it has to be said) and Wayne Coyne’s doppleganger walked by.

Oh. Hello blog. I’ve been a bit busy for the last couple of weeks - actually spending time in that funny room with the ultra blue ceiling and funny yellow light. I’ve got the sunburn to prove it. I have to admit I was a little bit nervous about coming back here; afraid you wouldn’t remember me, waffling about what I would say to you, nervous that you’d moved on and found someone else. But here I am and here you are, right where I left you. That level of devotion is a little pathetic, you know?

Highlights of the last couple of weeks:

- rocked maid of hounournessness and promptly pulled 2986 bobby pins out of my hair as a result of that

- got a blistery sunburn

- contemplated buying a music store

- contemplated opening an art store

- bought 4 tubes of lipstick I really don’t need but I do love me some lipstick so I daresay they’ll get used

- drank a lot of wine

- enjoyed a hot tub at the home of a fabulous, fabulous man

- got some more contract work in

- visited the market for the first time in 8578 years

- danced like a batshit crazy maniac in high heels

- bought paint for my poor, grimey, only-ever-primed-by-the-whanks-who-were-supposed-to-paint-it trim in my house

- helped the son make a model of the royal ontario museum out of clay

- had a clay fight (which resulted in purged pores, so I guess there’s an upside to that)

- came up with a laundry basket full of fabric I’ve decided I can live without

- came up with a monster pile of clothing I’ve decided I can live without

- slept in

- made a date for our yard sale (which will be held July 5th for anyone who would like to come buy my shit)

- neglected my kids and let my house go all lord of the flies but I’ve got the conch shell back and no brains have been spilled across rocks just yet

What’s to come:

- this weekend is Ode’min Giizis combined with the 400 Fest Focus Fair and boy golly am I excited! I hope to see some of you locals there

- sprog the eldest will reach an age which ends in ‘teen’ for the first time this Sunday and boy golly do I feel old

- sleepover birthday party for said sprog with other boys who are of ages which end in ‘teen’

- purging, purging and more purging for the upcoming yard sale

- peonies in full bloom

- baby showers

- impending moves to faraway lands by dear friends

- camping

For reals. The bitch is living the bohemian life I’m supposed to be living. True story. A vedic astrologer told me so. She stole my totem animals; bees & crows. Another true story. A traditional first nations healer told me so. I know, I know. Totem animals are supposed to be dark and edgy, but I’m quite happy with the thought that my spirit guides are are busy bumbling lazily from flower to flower or being distracted by shiny things and bits of string. I don’t care that it means I’m a fickle child. She stole my fashion aesthetic and she anthropomorphises clothing the way I do. And ‘Seussian‘ is my adjective. I made it up in 1992 whilst describing to my father the dining chairs and stair rails I want him to make for me. I have fellow blogger and lover of decay, Leslie, for helping me to discover the transgression. One day I’m going to waltz right up to Ms. Puett’s front door and demand it all back…or propose and hope that she’ll keep me in the manner to which I would like to become accustomed in return for sexual favours, great food and hours of mindless entertainment.

In the meantime, you can read more about my life here, here, & here.

And have some more eye candy too:

Maybe we don’t need to get hitched at all. I could just live in the chicken coop and be her back door Jezebel.

Oh my. Shiney, shiney, dusty books and magnolias and stuffed dead things. How could I not love her?

Why wouldn’t a girl want to spend the entirety of a gorgeous, sunny Wednesday afternoon putting lightly gathered pin tucks into fiddly satin fabric while waiting anxiously for a prognostic phone call from a pediatric orthopaedic surgeon?  Nevermind that I could have been out helping to paint a mural with a mum-to-be for the room of her babe-to-be and interacting with actual adults.  Nevermind that I’ve only just learned that said pediatric orthopaedic surgeon is not in the office until Friday (yet lead me to believe there was a sense of urgency on this score and would be calling me today.)  Nevermind that I spent $30 to have copies of the xrays couriered to him after spending 3 and a half hours waiting at the hospital to get them done because the poor sprog requiring the surgeon was due to go on a camp trip with her class and Columbian pen pal and that was sort of, kind of hinging on the current state of the bolt in her hip.  Nevermind all of that, I have pin tucks.  Pretty sure they’re the only thing keeping me from going bat-shit crazy right now.

p.s. I sent the sprog to camp anyway…with her stepmum to keep her in line.

I’ve made a couple of fun discoveries over the last couple of days. One I’m completely sold on and the other…well…possibly not so much.

The first is this baby:

It’s a rolling invisible zipper foot by H.A. Kidd (or Unique depending on which area you’re in) and it’s my new BFF. Anyone who knows anything about my sewing habits knows that I abhore installing zippers and absolutely despise replacing zippers which is why, when asked, I give a quote of 123 bajillion dollars to do such a chore. Well this puppy changes everything (and reduces zipper replacement prices to 118 bajillion dollars) as it nicely makes those lovely invisible zipper folds and it will make an invisible out of a visible and has universal attachments for just about every type of presser foot shank for an entire $3.79 CDN. The only bother is that I actually have to unscrew the foot snap from the shank on my machine in order to use it, but that certainly beats ripping out seams any day. Thank you, thank you lovely fellow Fabricland customer for introducing this to me!

So the other thing is two-fold; firstly there is Victory Art Supplies - a new art supply store on Rubidge Street, downtown (yay!) A proper art supply store, you know the kind where you can smell the oil paints before you make it through the door? Yeah, that kind. My favourite. So I went in a picked up a set of watercolour paints and some paper. My first set of watercolours ever. They’re intimidating. I mucked about with them for a bit on the front porch saturday, just playing with mixing and colours and brushes. I managed to produce a lowly little lemon before I had to call it quits for fear of sunstroke and after lighting the newspaper which was on the ground beside me on fire (we won’t talk about that.)

It’s not finished yet, obviously (I fully intend to put it on a plate with a little lowly fish or something) but wanted to post as evidence, really, that I just don’t ‘get’ watercolours…yet…hopefully that qualifier applies. I’ve always stuck to the kinds of paints which have me making rough outlines and filling them in, see? It’s difficult to make the mental renegotiation of positive and negative space as one has to with watercolours (because using white paint is cheating.) So you can see here that I layer colour in like I would with acrylics or oils. Ugh. So frustrating but I will push on.

Beyond that I spent a good chunk of time frollicking in the fields of eye candy that is the Director’s Label series and being reminded that Jonathan Glazer’s treatment of Rabbit in Your Headlights is likely my favourite music video ever.

You should go watch it.

This is what one sees these days when touring past the north side of our humble abode:

Once upon a time (this time last year) it was a backdrop the boy sprog painted for his grade six class production of Moliere’s Le Medecin Malgre Lui, now it’s proudly displayed on our back porch amidst the outdoor toys and the barbecue utensils and the spiderman umbrella lampshade and man, does it get some funny reactions. We live in what I affectionately refer to as The Student Ghetto; a neighbourhood populated almost (but not quite) entirely by students in the central core of our fair city. Our home itself is right on the main drag but is a corner lot with the other open side facing a ‘quiet’ street which is almost everything but quiet. Nobody believes children actually live in this neighbourhood because parents keep them all locked up out of the way of the halfway house residents, the sketchy corner where obviously dodgy hand-offs are made and the insane drivers who try to get from 0-60mph along the 50 metre stretches between the two main, one-way streets. Funnily enough, I haven’t witnessed much of this behaviour since Plato and the unknown guy on the left (not Cicero as the name on the bottom left would have one believe - Cicero, quite literally, did not make the cut) have been there. It’s also become a fun conversation starter. So far I’ve met 3 immediate neighbours and one traveller since its installation. So huzzah to creepy philosophers.

Oh! And Crystal wins the print as she was the only one with the nads to post an interpretation publicly and not send smut to my inbox.  Now we really do need to arrange a scotch & cigars night.

So one of the wonderful things which happens when ones children near pubescence is that said children inevitably develop social lives independent from the play dates, sports & gatherings parents arrange for them and inevitably forget to include parents in the itinerary for such events and so get invited to birthday parties which they conveniently forget to tell parents about, make said parent broke after paying for all of the social expenses and lands the parent(s) mere hours away from committing the ultimate in social faux-pas; sending one’s child to a birthday party without a gift. Today was one such day, I was surprised to find out through a phone call from a panicky mum looking for RSVPs. Luckily I’m a crafty mum and was able to save the day, or at least my sanity, if you don’t mind my saying so. A trip to the local liquidators for a $10 yoga mat, a rifling through the fabric/trims stash and an hour of drafting/cutting/sewing time later; behold the magnificent yoga mat & carrier!

And the only reason I get to be all smug about it is because my daughter, upon seeing the gift I’d made for her friend exclaimed ‘Ugh! I was hoping it was for me!’ and hasn’t taken it off since.

Yay! I win!

As some of you may know, I’m kind of prone to having wacky, surreal and incredibly evocative dreamscapes.  For the last while my dreams have been no less insane but I struggle to remember them through the onslaught of wake-ups by the loin fruits requesting corn on the cob for breakfast (!!?!) or wondering if I cleaned their favourite undies.  This morning, however, I was able to recall the dream I was woken from very well and now, poor dears, you get to read all about it:

The dream began at a dinner with the party members of the wedding the sprogs and I are in come June.  After the dinner we quickly wrapped up, cleaned up and just sat chatting and lounging under a vividly starry summer sky (I could tell it was summer due to the constellations present - which of course makes no sense in the grand time scheme of reality, but it’s a dream; nonsense is its prerogative.)  I had a small mystery child of 2 or 3 years of age on my lap.  I’m not sure where she came from or to whom she belonged but she was actively listening to the adults banter around her when I engaged her in naming the constellations we could see.  So she and I were staring up in the sky with the white noise of conversation going on around us when the sky directly above did what could only be described as ’shattered’ like an oddly sky-shaped pane of glass, parts of which began folding in on themselves like bits of sky-coloured origami to reveal a massive UFO which seemed to be made of little other than millions of lights in millions of colours which could have been mistaken for stars themselves were they not so colourful (if you can imagine those robot/alien things from Titan AE in spaceship form with more colours and drawn by a pointillist with OCD you’re probably good for half a clue.)  The ship quickly blinked away and the sky returned to normal with a reversal of the folding action by which it disappeared.

Where I was rather nonplussed about the whole event, the sprog on my lap was down-right freaked.  She took on a Damien-esque intensity in relating to me the nature of the evil we had been exposed to.  Her attention could not be drawn away from the sky as she was convinced that the weird and wonderful space craft would return to get us all.  Though it was only she and I who witnessed the first appearance of the UFO, the rest of the party’s attention was drawn to my efforts to quell her worries and caught on to what we were looking at and for.  Soon enough, with everyone watching, the phenomenon unraveled again.

This time it didn’t blink away immediately.  This time it seemed to notice that it had been noticed and with a strange level of sentience it turned to look back at us, pointing its long nose directly at us from what used to be the sky.  Then it blinked away again.  Then everyone lost their shit.  In the hubbub of the communal freak-out the craft returned with the same level of drama with which it came the times before; this time closer and rather more menacingly, angling then extending its nose down until it almost touched the table in the centre of our little group and dropped an alien (which looked quite a lot like Hordak from the She-Ra cartoons) in the middle of the table.  Somehow, the small child in my lap had armed herself with a long garden tool (I’m thinking it may have been a hoe,) lept from my lap and impaled the alien thing on the blunt end of it through the back of the neck.  And that was the end of the dream.

If you’ve read this far I think you deserve a cookie…or a gold star…or an award of some sort.  In fact, I think I’ll offer one…but not without working just a little bit harder first.  I will give away one of my precious Marcel Dzama prints & my undying affection to whomever comes up with the most convincing interpretation of this dream.

Here are the ground rules:

A) Submissions must be made in the comments of this post chez le blogue proper (take note, facebookers - I’m sorry, but I’m far too lazy to compile notes from both venues) and you must be willing to share - if it shows up in my inbox it doesn’t count.

B) Submissions can come from any school of dream interpretation - even your own made up ones.

3) Closing date will be a week tomorrow - Friday, May 16, 2008.

D) As much as it pains me, I will disregard any issues with spelling, grammar or punctuation in the decision-making process, though I reserve the right to make fun of people for these misdemeanors behind their backs and to their faces forever and ever, amen.

E) Bonus marks will be given for creativity.

F) Submissions must be reasonably clean (take note, Freudians) I don’t want to read about anything that wouldn’t air on Canadian prime time television - ie: euphemisms and clinical terms for body parts are permitted but lengthy, detailed accounts of how the secretion of bodily fluids come about are not permitted - if you really want to tell me about how all of the phallic symbols in my dream mean that I have penis envy, that’s fine.  Fine, but so unoriginal you won’t win.

7) Points will be docked for gratuitous use of curse words.  I know I swear on my blog but it’s my blog and I declare it a dictatorship, not a democracy - so do as I say and not as I do.

H) I don’t want posts about how much more fucked up your dreams are than mine.  It’s not that I don’t care it’s just that this one’s all about me, so stay on topic.  If you want to share go get your own damn blog and make your own post about it.  Let me know when you do and I’ll do my best to read it, pick it apart and possibly make fun of you too.

There you have it.  Consider it an exercise in creative writing.  Consider it an act of armchair psychology.  Either way, I want to know what you lot think about it.

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