There were dozens of these little umbrellas stuck into trees all over the campus of the Oregon College of Art and Craft. The effect was Christo crossed with Miyazaki.
Monthly Archive for October, 2007
Page 2 of 2
So I’m at the airport, waiting for the fabulous Laurie Halse Anderson’s flight to get in, and I see a man walk past with a pirate-themed pet carrier.
I was filled with an urge to ask, deadpan, if his cat was really a pirate.
So it’s a good thing that I didn’t buy the Kindergoth bag, because then I wouldn’t have still been looking at Goodwill the other day, and then I wouldn’t have found this one:
Which, when it’s not at Goodwill, nicely broken-in with some schmutz on the bottom, possibly makeup, that proves to be mostly removable with the application of hot coffee (I just sort of thought, huh, the coffee’s the same color as the bag, so it won’t mess with the dye, and since it’s hot it’ll probably be good at getting off the stain) — is this.
I have asked this before but I am endlessly fascinated by it: what are your favorite thrift scores??
Comparisons, that is.
Yesterday I had my lunch hour Pilates class. This teacher does a mix of Pilates and yoga, and I’m fine with that since I’m a fan of both. We always do some balance poses.
Here’s the thing with balance poses. Say you’re hanging out in Dancer and you’re feeling really steady and good. So you start looking around and thinking, “Wow, some of these folks are pretty shaky. Look how she’s wobbling over there! Oh, but she looks great, she’s got really good extension, way more than I can get–”
That is the exact moment you will lose your balance.
Application to non-Pilates situations left as an exercise for the reader.
Dudes. I was totally the runner-up at the Define-A-Thon at Broadway Books. I had great trepidation about the Define-A-Thon (trepidation is a good Define-A-Thon-style word, actually) but it turned out to be super fun. It brought back memories of playing Around The World in elementary school, although I managed not to get sent out of the room for being too excited.
The event, excellently emceed by Gabriel Boehmer, brought out a bunch of writers, among them Katie Schneider, Ellen Urbani, Monica Drake, and Kassten Alonso. Kass won, and as previously stated I was the runner up. We were the two library employees in the room, so perhaps that conveyed an unfair advantage. The library school student who was present (also a bookseller) acquitted herself nobly as well. Cheers all around.
Other notable literary events of the day: Lessons From A Dead Girl appeared! And so, apparently, did a book by some guy named Colbert.
Also: all y’all in Portland should buy your tickets to see Laurie Halse Anderson this coming Monday night! It will be super fantastic.
When you go to an estate sale, you don’t expect to find CDs from the Pixies and The Primitives, but we did: Bossanova and Pure. It was a bit disconcerting.
This person had apparently been a commercial photographer, mostly of weddings. There were a few heavy albums documenting the glossy, wholesome-looking nuptials of the well-heeled. At the bottom of a box mostly full of individual shots in a similar slick style, I found two black-and-white photos, one of a stark, rocky landscape and a sky full of ominous clouds, and the other of two cows very close to a barbed wire fence, looking at the photographer/viewer with an expression that it was not hard to anthropomorphize into a sad but resigned awareness of their confinement. It made me wonder if that was a different photographer’s work, or if it represented the style the person would’ve preferred to work in, if not for the need to pay the bills.
P.S. Many thanks to all for your insightful comments on the Kindergoth bag. Inevitably, in the interval between my post and my next trip to Ross, it was snapped up by someone else, and there was only one.
Should I go back to Ross Dress For Less and buy this bag? It is cheap, and I am deeply amused by its Goth-by-way-of-kindergarten-teacher aesthetic, and by the fact that one of the eye sockets of each of the skulls has a tiny rhinestone inside. But I am unsure as to whether the whole skull trend is, like, totally played out already.
Advise me, Internet!
Thanks to my fine, responsive brakes, the lady who blew through the stop sign at full speed, talking on her cell phone, did not end up slamming into my car.
I honked, and she sort of glanced back at me with this odd expression.
Immediately, I started wondering, wait, did I have a stop sign? Was it my fault we almost had an accident? I didn’t. It wasn’t. But I was ready to blame myself, just because of the way she was looking at me. You ever feel like that?
What I really wanted to tell you about, though, was Steve Earle’s cover of Way Down In The Hole, which will be the theme for Season Five of The Wire. He strips the song down, keeps the beat subtle but insistent. I’m calling this the “One Day At A Time” version. Maybe it’s just because I’m conflating Earle with Waylon, the character he plays on the show, but this version really makes me think of the quiet strength it takes to keep those particular devils down in the hole. And now that I’ve read this interview, I think maybe my interpretation isn’t that far off.
September 28th, 1997: I was on a train from Portland back to Ann Arbor. I’d just interviewed for a job. I’d done my first (and so far last) storytime. I read, among other things, Caps For Sale, a story featuring caps (as you might suspect) and monkeys.
September 28th, 2007: I wear Bill Mudron’s cap at a Stumptown pre-party.
(Also pictured, from right: Terri Nelson, Patrick Farley, and part of Steve Lieber. Photo by ocean yamaha.)
The next night, I take my one and only Stumptown photo, of the refrigerator downstairs at Cosmic Monkey.
In 1997, I could count the Portland people I knew on the fingers of one hand.
In 2007, I need both hands and both feet just to get through all the members of the studio.
How did it happen? The right place, the right time. But you don’t know if it’s the right place, you can’t know that it’s the right time. I remember the night, a few months after we’d moved to Portland, when I kept pushing the radio button presets in my car and getting nothing but static. Finally it dawned on me: they were still set to Ann Arbor stations.
I’ve sat at a lot of tables at a lot of comic conventions since. I used to be notorious for bailing out. Sometimes I’d come back with a sandwich for Steve. Not always. (Sorry, man.)
Then I started writing comics. (Remember about vampirism?) These days, not only do I not leave the con, I often don’t even leave the table.
Everything I bought at Stumptown 2007 was from Dylan Meconis: some original art from Click (not to be confused with the multiple-author novel of the same name, which sounds cool, though I have not yet read it) and a super Shrinky-Dink necklace of a two-page comics spread, panels and word balloons only. Congratulations, Dylan: you’ve made an identity badge for comics writers.
It was 1994, not 1997, when the Offspring released “Come Out And Play (Keep ‘Em Separated),” but allow me a little artistic license with my ten-years-ago vs. today musings, because for the longest time, I tried so hard to keep ‘em separated: librarian life, writer life — and it’s impossible. The library has a table at Stumptown. I didn’t work at it this year, but I have. Other library staff were at non-library tables. People who knew me from the library asked me library questions while I sat at my comics-writer table. I was on a panel about Comics in Libraries and I shifted between writer perspective and librarian perspective so many times I got a sort of mental whiplash. (It was nice to hear the library called “radical and anomalous,” though.) Both/and. Not either/or. You’d think I’d have figured that out sooner.
Two people asked me, “What themes do you usually write about?”
I think the question was code for: “Are there always queer girls and do they always make out?”
But I looked at everything on my table and said, “Relationships and performance.”
A few more things about Stumptown:
This was the first year for costumes.
Photo again by ocean yamaha.
Spacious Chinese restaurants work well for the inevitable Gigantic Con Dinner, but you can never order enough Pepper Salted Pei Pa Tofu, because no one who hasn’t had it before thinks they’re going to like it, but then they totally do.
It was great to introduce friends to other friends. I had a good conversation with an exhibitor up from L.A., remembered how much I’d liked talking with her last year, and finally deployed the power of the Internet to learn her last name. She wants to move to Portland, it turns out.
October 1, 2007: I’m paying for breakfast, entirely in ones. The barista smiles, raises an eyebrow, and asks, “Are you moonlighting?”
Yes, actually. Have been for years.
I came for a job. I got a community. Thanks, everyone.
P.S. Because I didn’t remember to tag my previous Stumptown posts with News/Appearances (my lack of tagging skills is perhaps the subject of another post), I will tag this one and take this opportunity to let y’all know about the next couple places I’ll be:
- Assembly on Literature for Adolescents Workshop: Helping Teens Discover A Sense of Place and Self Through YA Literature, New York: November 19-20.
- Mid-Ohio-Con, Columbus: November 24-25.