Woohoo! Photos from Nick Normal, the curator of the Flux Factory auction and exhibit that Stories from the Ruins appeared in. Big exhibit! Lots of stuff! So we're a little lost in the crowd, but then, so is everyone else. Here's a shot of our wee book, though you can't see it face-on. There are more photos to come though, and I'll post any with our book. In the meanwhile, here we are. Click for a larger picture and follow the red arrow:
I'm putting off doing my housework today by blogging, so you're getting a double dose of me at the moment. I've got two posts up over at Cocktail Party Physics and a third one going up tonight (and then I have to think of what else to blog about over there until the 14th! Oh the pressure!) I've gotten a few hits from there, too, since I started guest posting for Jen. I can't get at her statistics, so I don't know if her number of hits has fallen off or not.
Just for the heck of it, I googled myself again today and discovered a link to "The Bear Dancer" up at WBAI's Hour of the Wolf site in the Index to SF Online. I got a nice little reciprocal link from Diana Trout on her lovely mixed media/bookarts site. Then I found a couple of my photos—old, predigital ones too!—on a site about St. Paul's Cathedral choristers and in another blog meditation on philosophers. This, of course, since I joined Flickr, which makes them more widely accessible. Since I'm not a professional photographer, I don't really mind people using my photos as long as I get a tagline and a link. It's a nice bit of viral marketing if it brings people back to either my site or to the blog. Slowly, slowly, I'm infiltrating the net. . . .
Here's a little bit of viral marketing for a place I went to last night, with Dr. Em: The Mermaid Inn, on Second Ave. between 5th & 6th. Great seafood (better than the Blue Water Grill meal I had with Mom the last time she was here) and the kind of decor I'm always suckered in by: not too formal with a lot of dark wood, a garden, a long bar, and tables on the street. The bacon wrapped scallops appetizer was divine: just a little smokey from the bacon, the scallops practically melting in my mouth. The lobster roll with Old Bay fries was so rich and yummy neither Em or I could finish ours. I took the leftovers home and made a nice lunch of them today. She had the Whale's Tale Pale Ale from Cisco Brewers and I had the Fisherman's Brew lager from Cape Ann Brewing Company, which is the lager I've been looking for all my life, or at least since I left England. I have to get some of this stuff to keep in the fridge, even if I have to schlep all the way over the Balducci's for it. No dessert menu, even if we'd wanted any, but we were brought a demitasse cup full of chocolate mousse that was just right. Then we waddled over to St. Mark's and bought more books, our usual passtime when we're wandering around town together.
And last but not least, a new song from my friend Peri, "Credo," which made me cry.
Okay, enough procrastination. I can't stand it anymore. Off to clean.
When summer arrives in earnest, I tend to spend as little time as possible in my apartment, since I've more or less decided to forego air conditioning until it's really unbearable (not because I can't afford it, but because I can't justify it ecologically). This means I usually take myself off to a bar or cafe after work, sometimes with friends, but usually alone, with either a good book or my laptop, depending on how ambitious I feel. Since I work four days a week now, my writing time is a lot more limited than it used to be, and the projects I'm involved in at the day job are a lot more mentally demanding than being a word processor was. And the brain cells are starting to go too, at my age, which makes picking up the laptop after work a lot harder than it used to be.
Lately, I've been meeting up with friends for a stint of shopping, or for dinner or a movie, but I'm equally happy to be completely by myself. And actually this is a very good time for me to work on non-blog projects (though I can also do that, courtesy of numerous WiFi sites around the city). So now that summer is here in earnest, with humidity and heat, I'll be appearing here less frequently than I have been because, as far s I'm concerned, it's Writing Season. (No, not wabbit season!) I realize that it's vacation season for most people, but then, I'm not most people.
So there will be another sort of hiatus here for a bit, starting this weekend, while I dig into my writing projects in earnest. I'll be guest blogging from July 4-14th over at Jen's blog, Coctail Party Physics, while she's in Buenos Aires, taking a strictly enforced vacation with our pals Bob & Carlos. But after that, I'll be mostly in non-blogging mode. I'll resurface now and then, probably, but I can't guarantee when. So look for me when you see me. Hopefully I'll have some great writing news to report then.
'Scuse me, while I kiss the sky . . .
Okay, so that's a really pretentious little moment there, but I'm pretty psyched about having Stories from the Ruins: Sixteen Poems About 9/11 being at the Flux Factory May 20-27th for their Works on Paper Show and Affordable Art Sale. Saturday Night is the opening (my very first! Woohoo! Well, actually, the very first of mine that I've been to, since I couldn't make the Detroit Institute of Arts show.) from 6-10. There will be bands (Marla Hooch, The Love Loves, The Dirty Projectors, and Fur Cups For Teeth as well as DJ brotherbeat), food, and, of course, General Mischief. Come hang out, eat, dance, admire the art and maybe even buy something to support Flux Factory.
Here's the address: 38-38 43rd Street, Long Island City, NY, 11101 (718.707.3362) Hint: It's in the middle of Sunnyside Yards, so it's a little hard to find. See the directions.
Made a new book last week for friend and fellow poet Carlos Schröder, from one of his untitled poems, which I've called Border and Frontier. At some point I'll be making a larger collection of Carlos's work and I told him this was sort of a promise of things to to come. Carlos writes in both Spanish and English and is much better known in Argentina, where he grew up, than he is here and I'm delighted to work with his poems. This is an extremely limited edition (only 2), though I may do one in Spanish too as a special request, and not for sale. I'm just happy I found something cool to do with that great blue paper I was originally going to use for Highfield's book. It works for this so much better.
I feel like a real geek girl tonight. Not only was I teaching an InDesign class at work today, but I managed to get the update on my website up a few days early. Surf on over and take a look at it.
And if you notice any broken links or whatever, be sure to let me know.
It's a very small and select audience, but this is what I feel like today, underneath the miserable respiratory infection. The Book was a success, and I knew I'd done good when Big Paul choked up on me. The folks who saw it at work were impressed too, but Highfield's the one I wanted to do it right for, so it was his opinion that counted. There might be a couple of minor fixes, but it's essentially a done deal, and Paul thinks his folks will really like it. The rest of the kids & in-laws have been following it on the photo album and they're impressed, too, apparently. The first thing Paul said when I took it out of the box was, "The pictures don't do it justice." They don't, of course, because they're flat and the book is so tactile. But the real pay-off was watching him choke up as he was leafing through it.
So this was a big step out on my own that looks like it paid off. Wahoo!
Nothing major, but I've deleted a couple of photo albums (figured you'd seen enough of my apartment, my ancestors, and my pals) and added one that's going to detail the making of new book projects. At the moment, you'll find the early stages of the hand-made scrap/recipe book I'm putting together for Jackie and Chuck Highfield, the parents of one of my oldest friends, Paul, for their 50th Wedding anniversary. It's a little late in the making due to circumstances beyond my control, but it's starting to come together now. In the future, this album will chronicle new books that Marcia and I have in the works, and maybe even the process of putting together Stories from the Ruins. I'm not going to take you through the whole creative process from brainstorming in bars (which is more fun to do than to watch) to pimping the finished product (which is the least fun part of the job), just the nitty-gritty of construction. Feel free to email me with questions about the books.
Added some new reading material in the Head Candy section, too.
Back when he was living in Detroit, Rob was also in an early music group out of Ann Arbor called Vox, which now has a new CD (Josquin and the Lost Generation) of one of its best concerts. I heard the early demo for it and it's wonderful, and Rob, now on Guam, will tell you all about it with much more detail and a better musical vocabulary than I have, as well as choice tidbits of gossip—oh wait, that's me. Never mind. There are also sound clips on the site, to give you a little taste.
While I'm here, I might as well plug my friend Sarah Spencer's music too. She's primarily a New Orleans jazz sax player, one of the hottest in Britain (and the youngest to play at Preservation Hall in New Orleans) but she's recently taken up singing, in which she channels Bessie Smith in an amazing way. Sarah's vocals give a new spin to the phrase "I was born a poor black child." This would be news to her mother and father, but you'd swear it was true, listening to her sing. She hasn't yet listed the album, "Confessin' the Blues," on her website, but I'm sure if you drop her an e-mail, she'd be glad to fix you up with a copy or three.
