ITEMS OF INTEREST proliferate now that my camera is a phone (and I’m never without it). With no news or narrative to share, I’ll just leave these here.
Islamic window carving
Closed caption errors
Witt's videos for "Nov 14-20"
Johanna drawing
Mug from my mom
Xacto slices
Our hellish linoleum
Bucket lifts on Minnehaha
70's Op Art fabric
Thursday night Dude Doodles
New Bill Viola piece at the M.I.A.
14th floor sunset
NOT-SO-FOREBODING OMENS FOR 2012
+ This is Minnesota’s warmest January in recorded history (OK, it was fun while it lasted)
+ Obama’s presumed opponent is a snide Wall Street 1%er who can’t attack health care reform—go GOP!
+ After 13 months of exacting labor, my largest (and arguably most rewarding) project launched this week
+ We’re at a point where 99% of all moderately amusing ideas now have a Tumblr
+ Minneapolis is testing curbside organic waste pickup and this recycling nerd is psyched
+ Johanna’s almost run out of titles from my least favorite kids’ book series of all time
+ They’re reopening the public school next door in 2013 thanks to Sarah’s epic perseverence
+ Despite years of resistance (and sound reasons), I suddenly have an iPhone
+ I will visit a Chuckie Cheese’s for the first time this week (as a parent or otherwise) …
+ At least I know what I’m wearing
MY MIND IS UNUSUALLY SERENE LATELY (hardly cause for complaint, except that I blog best under duress). I’m furnishing that surplus mental real estate with reading: most recently a 1000-page novel about proto-scientists in the age of Enlightenment (oof; thanks, Kev!), a gift subscription to the New York Review of Books (best eva, Marc!), and, just this week, the revelatory rock crit manifesto I might have written if I knew 100x more (thanks for getting the hint, sis!).
It’s not just me. Sarah’s mainlining Self Help and alternative health books as Johanna inches toward that moment where she can pick up and read stuff unaided. Betting we’re obsolete by February.
In other timesucks, I’m compiling an unscheduled mixtape for my club, “FOLK-HOP,” a set of alternating rap and folk tunes that’s sure to displease fans of both. I’m also closing shop next week to chill and ski with the in-laws while jumping on all Happy Hour invitations until January.
How much leisure can one man handle? Here, I’ll show you.
Jo and Sarah churn out ultra-vivid monoprints at the Highpoint Center. Mine suffered from a lack of ink and inspiration.
The great-granddaughter with our beloved Nassif Matriarch, still a formidable bridge player at 89.
Lo, Jo, Louis, and Two Dads In Loungewear.
No idea what inspired this, but I’m adopting it as my 2012 mantra.
Paul’s Ai Wei Wei rubylith design, a leftover Make Sh!t project to bookend our first full year.
With no ice or snow, we’re running all over.
Catching yellow-hued views at dusk from the Guthrie.
For months, Sarah’s been saving “special” bottles for kombucha (a more vile beverage I’ve never encountered), only to have every last one freeze and break. Repulsion averted!
A modest wishlist posted to the front door.
Allison, newly 34 with Beef Bourguignon, at her second birthday celebration of the night. Steady there, sister.
A panda inspects the work of beavers on the East Bank of the Mississippi River.
I sit here so contentedly.
>> Redd Kross – Look On Up At the Bottom
>> Dylan – Watching the River Flow
MY FRIEND TRAVIS ASKED ME to make something for his art gallery. It’s not exactly a gallery, but an extra room where he has shows. Maybe not “shows” so much as house parties where there’s art. Not having attended before, I can’t even say it’s about art per se. All this will have to be confirmed.
The assignment, dubbed “November 14-20,” is strict yet open-ended: document those days any way I want. And make it fit in a 12-inch cube. We gather on December 8th to see people’s weeks.
My blog, camera, and Facebook are sufficiently snore-inducing chronicles of my comings and goings. Rather than mining or duplicating those efforts, I went non-journalistic and, more importantly to me, non-digital. My unifying principle was Do what I like to do (but usually don’t): draw, collect, and cobble things together using materials and processes I have at hand.
What’s the opposite of a Status Update? I’m going for that.
These seven collages are made from scraps of my days—picked, sketched, assembled, and Xeroxed haphazardly. With some hindsight and luck, maybe they’ll resolve into coherence. Or just as likely not. Which makes them true to life.
LAST TUESDAY I IMAGINED MY LAPTOP WAS STOLEN. I came out of the grocery with my eggs, cheese, and French Roast to find the bag wasn’t in my car. Only after I made several panicky calls, cruised the vicinity for a perp, and stopped to report it at the police station did I grasp that I’d left it at home.
The depth of my delusion was breathtaking. I jumped to a far-fetched conclusion—teens! prowling the co-op lot! burgling soft-headed patrons too trusting to lock up!—when reality was much more plausible.
Competence and control are my stock-in-trade. I deliver what’s expected with no drama. I avoid risk and stick to routine. While I can overreact when things go wrong, I generally hold it together even when others can’t. It’s about the only part of the Male Archetype I’m good with.
And yet I lose my marbles. It’s an not an altogether unwelcome reminder. Steely reliability can’t last forever, and it’s hardly the most lovable gift a guy can be known for. On the eve of my 38th year, maybe it’s time I get in touch with my inner buffoon—worry less about self-possession and laugh more at my follies and false conceits. (While I still have a choice, right?)
This is something I made for my newest friend, Louis Royal Martin, age 1 month. Aside from my usual technical hackery, there’s a mismatched piece that now seems glaring. See it? How did I miss that? I’m losing my goddamned mind.
>> NEU! – Crazy
>> Nico – Afraid
THE MOVEMENT TO OCCUPY FILL-IN-THE-STREET does strike a chord with me. I’d thrill to see our financial overlords brought to account and regulated with extreme prejudice (since Washington can’t fix little stuff like fee gouging though, I’m not holding my breath). True, the overthrow of Capitalism wouldn’t improve my lot much. But I find our unanimous worship of certain über-Capitalists almost more disturbing. It’s not indifference (and certainly not weather) that’s kept me away from the protest. Chalk it up to self-absorption and many small, pleasurable distractions from anger.
1) The distorting effects of 3M Color Transparency Film
2) Great flaming October sunsets
3) Collaborative photo zines documenting the season’s last night bikerides
4) Goats, asses and apples with Evelyn & Marc (who’s blogging again; good on ya!)
5) My inexpensive poster from Puerto Rico w/ extravagant professional frame job
6) Cactuses & Palm Trees; The Sun Says He’s Too Hot – 2011, Sharpie & Crayola marker on manila
7) Melancholy marina fogs over Grand Marais
8 ) Our leaves changed color without regard to the schedule
9) Explorers on the moon under 35-W
10) Hikers with Day-Glo Lichen
>> Tennis – Marathon
>> Built to Spill – Strange
>> Willie Colón – Che Che Cole
A MONTH AGO, MY FIRST MOMENTOUS INEVITABILITY as a parent came to pass. Johanna’s arrival in Kindergarten was a triumph. How was there any doubt? It seems obvious now, though we sweated it plenty (a symptom of the over-protective culture that defines me, much as I resist). As the youngest in her class, I’d half expected Johanna to run away screaming, if not burst into flames. Instead she blew me a kiss and started running the place.
For the first time since Johanna came along, I’m seeing her experiences through the lens of my own. I remember Day 1: walking past the crossing guards, taking seats on the colored tape, napping on a towel, meeting a boy named Carnell in his Aquaman Underoos.
Jo invited some new classmates to her 5th birthday party. I had the uncanny feeling not only that I knew them—the silent girl who draws well, the redheaded wild child—but that I would now know them forever. Their faces were lines connecting 30 years before and 30 years hence.
Something similar happened when I met their parents. It’s like by joining the school, we adults are suddenly on a team, knit together by the noisy, beautiful, tantrum-throwing things we care about most. These people want to like you. They are grateful for your effort. Your victories are theirs and vice-versa. Maybe others get this reception in their workplace or church. I wouldn’t know.
The school is in Northeast Minneapolis, an unbusable distance from us. True, I’m refueling my car more often. But the drive is almost absurdly scenic—five rolling miles of Mississippi River I share with rowers, runners and barges. Maybe I’ll buy Jo carbon offsets for her 6th birthday.
Back at home, there’s a palpable sense of relief. That Jo’s happy. That we made a smart decision. And that maybe we’re done with such decisions for a while.
It’s a nice feeling.
• Ways a moose could kill you
• The trail’s unfortunate acronym
• How I kind of wish I wasn’t getting text messages here
• Idea for a cutthroat tourism jingle for Grand Marais: “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t stand Lutsen” (apologies to The Police)
• People I forgot to invite to my wedding (eight years too late)
• Similarities between beaver dams and furniture forts
• Animal sex
• A world without the smells and sounds of two-stroke engines
• What won’t people carve their names in?
• Snakes feel you coming
• Those rare things in life that sharing may ruin
• A yearning to renounce civilization
• That what I know about wilderness survival could fit on the back of a business card
• Mortal fear
• Whether this would make a decent blog post
IT’S A TRUISM OF 8TH GRADE ART CLASS (AND EVER SINCE) that sketching faces is the hardest. Which makes sense with the evolution of face perception—how we’re born to read people through their faces, and interpreting expressions successfully has social advantages. When a face is drawn with details awry, even a little bit, it looks instantly, appallingly wrong. You don’t just fail to recognize the likeness, it offends your understanding of people. Or of the person, if you know the face. It’s most disorienting when you’re the person drawn. Portraits have been known to hurt feelings.
This is one of my better self-portraits, and I don’t love it. I over-emphasize eyes. And put them in the wrong places. If my subjects don’t look startled or quizzical, they seem stoned or asleep.
A good time to do portraits is when people’s heads are still, like when making art or playing cards. I drew some friends the other night (all wearing mesh caps as it happened; I wore a Stetson, as seen in Paul’s Witt’s sketch). As usj, nobody was very convinced of the likenesses, though nobody seemed offended.
>> Black Lips – Don’t Mess Up My Baby
>> Tegan & Sara – You Wouldn’t Like Me
>> Dee Dee Warwick – You’re No Good
>> Small Faces — Song of a Baker
REALLY, YOU’VE BEEN A SUPER LANDLINE, 612-SCAM-LAB. But after 12 years, the world has changed. We’re totally different people now, people with expensive mobile data plans. It used to be so good—us huddling together around that old answering machine, tethered to your curly cord. But look at yourself now: bringing home solicitors at all hours, your once resounding ring gone feeble. And tell me, what is an “FCC approved line charge”?
We can’t support you anymore. So this is good…bye. (*sniff*)
