two kitties

Just Kids: Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe

When Patti Smith published a memoir, Just Kids, I swore I wouldn't read it. It won the National Book Award and then....really...anything that receives Titanic-worthy publicity just totally turns me off. But then someone I really love read it, and loved it, and said it was so worth the time.

Just Kids is about a lot of things, but it spins from an account of her romantic and artistic relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. I thought I had read everything I wanted to read about Robert. I didn't want to delve into another autopsy about the AIDS, Art, the NEA, and censorship. I've had enough of that in my day job to last me a lifetime.

But the book was so not about that.

It was about their relationship; and it was beautifully written.  (If I could tell the story of my great loves like she did...)  Infinitely more complex than a simple account of their love and creative partnership, Smith was able to unpack how their love for one another shaped each other's artistic work.

And they tried everything - writing; drawing; photography; jewelry design; theatre; performance poetry; installation art; fashion and on and on and on. I loved to read about their apartments; installations made from clothing, jewelry, strange objects they had collected from second-hand stores around New York City.

I envy that. A relationship where you can share what you've written and have someone respond with love, ideas, support. That kind of love doesn't really happen very often, and when it does, the surviving partner will often write a book about it. Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking being a recent one.

I loved to read about how Patti Smith's creative life changed once she cut off her hair.

Having recently gone back to blonde (can I get a HELL YEAH?!), I can tell you there is a difference. Hair matters.

And I was touched by how Smith wrote about the ebb and flow of the relationship with Mapplethorpe over the years:

"Both of us had given ourselves to others. We vacillated and lost everyone, but we had found one another again. We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free...

Robert would greet me, impatient to show me something he was working on. One evening, having read my notebook, he designed a totem for Brian Jones. It was shaped like an arrow, with rabbit hair for the White Rabbit, a line from Winnie the Pooh, and a locket-sized portrait of Brian. We finished it together and hung it over our bed. "Nobody sees as we do, Patti." he said again. Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was if we were the only two people in the world."

I know, right?! I dare you to find me a writer or an artist who doesn't want that kind of love.....

 

 

Life Lessons I Learned From Facebook.

I did this spot a couple of years ago for Ignite Bend 1. I shared it on the blog at the time but that link is no longer working. Yesterday, someone passed me this YouTube clip. The message is still relevant for me.

Oh...and...friends...especially Harvey... if your photo is in my presentation - it is because I had your photo in my computer and it "worked" for whatever I was trying to accomplish in the talk.

 

 

 

Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian Cookbook

Since Christmas, I've been on a self-imposed austerity campaign. As in, I'm not going to spend ONE UNNECESSARY DOLLAR during the entire month of January. I've been cooking at home, skipping my favorite lattes at the roadside coffee shack, and reading all the books I already own but have never bothered with.

Anyway, that whole thing lasted a total of 14 days. Mike wrecked the truck ($1500 minimum) during an ice storm, so we had take it in to the body shop. It was my first trip inside a non-food store in about a month. I promptly blew $300 on a new pair of snowshoes, some poles, a couple of new cookbooks.

I follow Veggie Burgher on Twitter and the last few months she's been cooking like crazy. Christmas was non-stop cookies from Isa Moskovitz' and Terry Romero's Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar and meals from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian Cookbook.

As I was checking out at Borders, my old man cashier says to me, "SO, you're going to cook some vegetarian food, huh?" Now being a vegetarian in Montana is considered a crime against the cow. It just ain't done. It just ain't raaaght. And quite frankly, it's almost impossible.

But me, displaced city girl, I also have *my* dislikes. For example, I don't like it when cashiers make comments about my purchases. I nodded and said, "Uh huh", but in my mind? I was thinking, "Yeah. Tonight I'm serving my favorite dish, Vegetable Gratin a la Shut The Fuck Up.

It was delicious. Here is a savory mushroom goat-cheese tart with potato crust. It was incredible. Even Meat Man Mike loved it.

On the side, I did a Romaine lettuce salad with sundried tomatoes, roasted peppers, garlic, and pine nuts.

Sorry about the crummy photos. I was too hungry to do the food model thing.

Both recipes are from Mark Bittman's book. What have you been making lately?

Romanian Folk Art and Ritual: The Goat Dance

Stag
20th century
Region of Moldova
Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest

 

Traditional Romanian rituals are a mix of pagan, Eastern Orthodox and Western Christianity. At Christmas and New Year, ritual dances use masks and fetishes like the "stag" pictured abov.

  The capra or "Dance of the Goat" (or stag) is danced by young men in costumes and masks representing old people, shepherds, and the devil. Whether goat or stag, the animal is killed, mourned, buried and resurrected in the dance.

For the fetish, a patterned woven blanket over a wooden core is used for the body. The head is made of wood with real horns. The stag here sports a huge rack of antlers, trimmed with tinsel, bells and tassels. The wooden mouth of both the goat and stag are made to clack. 

The dance is usually performed on New Year's Eve and, in history, was considered a heathen ritual aimed at increasing the fertility of the herd or, more generally, of crops. In recent years, the goat dance is seen more as an opportunity to ring in the New Year and show off the beautiful hand textiles of the region.

Poet Dora Malech: You had me at no duh.

Love Poem

by Dora Malech

Dora Malech

If by truth you mean hand then yes

I hold to be self-evident and hold you in the highest—

ko to my ot and bait to my switch, I crown

you one-trick pony to my one-horse town,

dub you my one-stop shopping, my space heater,

juke joint, tourist trap, my peep show, my meter reader,

you best batteries-not-included baring all or

nothing. Let me begin by saying if he hollers,

end with goes the weasel. In between,

cream filling. Get over it, meaning, the moon.

Tell me you’ll dismember this night forever,

you my punch-drunking bag, tar to my feather.

More than the sum of our private parts, we are some

peekaboo, some peak and valley, some

bright equation (if and then but, if er then uh).

My fruit bat, my gewgaw. You had me at no duh.

Danny MacAskill, "Way Back Home".

 

Busby Berkeley: A Movie Choreographer's Magnetic Dreams

 

Read about Busby Berkeley's life.

Shelly: Animated Short Film by Johnny Kelly

Shelly from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

Ophelia: Sir John Everett Millais

Ophelia is a minor, but haunting, character in Shakespeare's Hamlet - a tale of tragic deception, madness, death, and suicide. She lives to please the men in her life; men who never accept or return her love.

Hamlet was kind to her for a time but became cold and cruel. She returns that cruelty with love but, in the end, Hamlet humiliates her after they are intimate.

Unable to cope with his cruelty, Ophelia begins the descent into madness. She wanders to the river, singing love songs and twirling flowers in her hair. Finally, she drowns herself.

Ophelia was a popular subject for Victorian painters - though most chose to romantic portrayals of her innocence and beauty. Sir John Everett Millais shocked Victorian England with his painting of Ophelia (1851).  Here she is - hands stiff; mouth ajar; skirts floating. 

If you are interested in the story of Hamlet, you might try renting one of the film productions. Screen adaptations of Shakespeare's work are often easier to follow than trying to read the plays. Probably the best place to start is with Director Franco Zeffirelli's version. Zeffirelli cast...wait for it...Mel Gibson as Hamlet. Ophelia is played by Helena Bonham Carter.

Mel Gibson...I know...but Zeffirelli's version is set in Shakespeare's time and gives amazing castle visuals. You could also try the not-as-grand Kenneth Branaugh/Kate Winslet, or Ethan Hawke/Julia Stiles; versions. Up to you. If you see all three you'll be able to see how each actress chose to play Ophelia - and there are important differences.

Modern adaptation of the story can also be a great introduction to Shakespeare. Did you know that one of the most familiar treatments of Hamlet is the Disney movie, The Lion King?

Litany: Billy Collins

Litany

You are the bread and the knife,

The crystal goblet and the wine...

-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,

not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.

--Billy Collins

How to Be Alone: Tanya Davis

And then there is the B side of friendship - learning how to be alone. If you depend on your friends to spoon feed you happiness - and then ask that it be served in a beautiful dish - your friendships won't last. I'm not talking about times of genuine need - I'm talking about that clutching, helpless, outwardly passive stance toward the world.

Carl Jung, Dream Interpretation, and The Red Book.

If you've spent any amount of time with me at all, you know that I am a vivid dreamer. I can rank them, in a way. Some of my dreams are impossible and fantastic: I've shared a bowl of blackberries with King Kong and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz in the woods near my childhood home.

Most are in-between: I have spent many a night trying to find my high school math classroom in a long corridor of empty rooms. The other night I went to bed so hungry that I dreamed that I was eating scraps off of dirty dishes in the sink.

A precious few are so real that my heart breaks on awakening: I have to say goodbye to people who have long since passed away in real life, or realize that a friend that I love, but never get to see, isn't in the next room waiting to have breakfast together.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, captured scenes from his unconscious during a period of great transition in his life. Some say it was a period of psychosis, others call it a time of "creative illness." During this time, Jung recorded his dreams and illustrated them in the style of an illuminated manuscript, bound in red leather. The "Red Book", as it has become known, is 205 pages of text and illustration, all by the hand of Carl Jung. 53 pages are full image, 71 containt both calligraphic text and artwork, and 81 pages contain calligraphic text alone.Click on the image above to make it bigger!

For decades, The Red Book remained private. Only a handful of Jung's relatives and a very few scholars had ever seen it. Finally, Sonu Shamdasani, an adviser to the Jung family convinced the heirs to allow it to be published and shared with the public. LA's Hammer Museum recently closed an exhibit - I'm not sure where The Red Book travels next.

A .pdf excerpt of Carl Jung's The Red Book is published on Scribd. This is the best place to view clean, sharp renderings of the illuminations.  You can see more of them, a little bit fuzzier, at this promotional site.

Who Does She Think She Is? Movie

Can you call someone a friend if they don't know you're an artist? This is something I struggle with.

The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I loved this book - perhaps more for the narrative style and depth of the material than the story itself. Stegner reminds me of how beautiful the sentence can really be. Here, the narrator is on a ship headed to Denmark and is wanting to avoid a Midwestern couple also on board:

"They are awkward and diffident, and would get chummy on the slightest invitation, but I know this kind from childhood -- pious, censorious, opposed to smoking drinking cardplaying dancing movies books language thinking. They sit in lace-curtained parlors and tsk-tsk on an indrawn breath, they know every unwanted pregnancy in town sooner than the girl does, they want English teachers in Augustana College fired for assigning A Farewell to Arms, they wrote the Volstead Act. And touching in a sort of way."

I knew people like that growing up in Minnesota. I wrote "yes!" in the margin.

This is a book about truth and memory. The narrator, Joe Allston, spent six months on sabbatical in Denmark some twenty years ago. The surface drama of what Allston recalls for the reader is easily absorbed, but there is something happening at another level than I need to return to. The narrator refers to Marcus Aurelius over and over again - Stoic philosopher and Roman warrior. The title, The Spectator Bird probably refers to that need for that narrator to separate himself from the emotional world of those around him, particularly as he finds himself in the last years of his life,

"Eden with graves is no longer Eden."

View all my reviews >>

If Lucy Fell Movie Review

I first caught If Lucy Fell ten years ago, late night. I remembered loving it, and even went as far as to buy the soundtrack created by Amanda Kravat's then-band, Marry Me Jane.

I watched it again last night on Netflix. In spite of the reviews, I think this movie has a lot going for it.

There are definite problems - lots of bad hair - but you can't overlook the hilarious performance Ben Stiller turned in as contemporary artist/media darling. Or Amanda Kravat's music. Scarlett Johanssen as an eleven year old. Elle MacPherson's natural/giraffe beauty.

Or the fact that the movie was made before Botox and Juvederm. If Sarah Jessica Parker was born in 1965, I'm the Pope.

Katherine Venturelli Artist Books

Lunar Journey. Fiddletown, California: Katherine Venturelli, 2004. Edition of 20. 5.75" x 6.75" closed; 11 x 12 x 4" open. Long tie closure which wraps several times around the book. Printed papers using chine colle techniques. Book fabric varies with each book.  

Seven Fires of Francis Mallmann: Zucchini Salad

I've been reading and cooking from Seven Fires for the past year. I found this gaucho grilling menu in Food & Wine magazine and was hooked. It reminds me of my years in Miami.

I love making Argentine barbecue for guests here in Montana, and they love my Chimichurri. I serve this tasty herb sauce and allow a choice between meat or a vegetarian main course of grilled vegetables.

Other favorites with guests have been the griddled goat cheese with spicy olives, which I serve with a crusty, hot bread. Eventually, I will work up to grilling over the open fire, but so far, I have modified the recipes for the barbecue.

The Meat Man gave me the Seven Fires cookbook for my birthday, and this Zucchini Salad is a recipe I'm looking forward to serving this summer.

Good Mail: How to Make Artist Books

I decided that today's studio project would be a letter to one of my best friends. He lives over in Australia.  I didn't have anything special to say, I just miss seeing him.

This week, I've been playing with book structures in the art studio, so I decided to work some of those ideas into mail. I used some envelopes I thrifted awhile back.

In each envelope, there was a random (but interesting) piece of paper. There were vintage postcards - this one from Kobe, Japan to a person here in NW Montana dated 1947.

Another vintage postcard of St. John's Cathedral in New York City notes that the sender sailed for Brazil that day, in 1949.

Other envelopes contained simple books, made with papers from my collage pile. This one is a one inch high modified accordion-fold book made with a cyanotype printed two years ago.

This one is just a photocopy of an aerial photo of commercial flower growing fields in California. An almost Rothko modified mini-accordion fold with belly band.

Another is an "instant book".

Folded flat, the inside looks like this:

The outside:

Dancers from American Ballet Theatre at the height of the company's success. A wordless narrative from this fat ballerina with the ruptured tendon.

I put my letter in the last envelope, shuffled them, and bound them together very simply. All of these techniques came from a great book I keep in my studio - Esther K. Smith's How to Make Books. Autographed copies are available here. 

Green Monster Smoothie Recipe

I've been eating healthier the last couple of months. Except for today, maybe. When I locked myself in the art studio, pulled the blinds, and ate six of these.

I'm not sure why that happened, but, according to Oprah's favorite book "Women, Food, and God" it is because - short summary - I hate myself and don't see any possibility of changing the things I don't like about my life, most of which were lived in my past, not my present. Apparently.

According to this book, the answer is to go off, find god - the one with the small "g" - love yourself, and eat what you want until the weight magically drops off. [Now you've read the book, too.]

ANNNNNYYYYWAYYYY.... I actually enjoy eating healthy. The part I don't like is adding more cooking to my already burgeoning to-do list in the home. Which is why a pureed meal, like "The Green Monster" comes in so handy.

I found the recipe via Iowa Girl Eats. There are many variations, but I've found this one tastes the best. The dominant flavor is actually the peanut butter. You don't taste the spinach. Bonus!

1 scoop vanilla protein powder of your choice

1/2 scoop chia seeds (or flax!)

1 frozen banana

1 cup vanilla almond breeze milk (or other milk of your choice)

1 T. peanut butter

2 handfuls baby spinach.

A handy mini-meal with lots of protein, fiber, and vitamins.

Poetry of Glenis Redmond.

Aracelis Girmay: Consider the Hands That Write This Letter.

                        I Have Always Loved You (2008) Heidi Rettig. Encaustic on panel, 8" x 8" x 2".

Consider the Hands that Write This Letter

        after Marina Wilson

Consider the hands
that write this letter.
The left palm pressed flat against the paper,
as it has done before, over my heart,
in peace or reverence
to the sea or some beautiful thing
I saw once, felt once: snow falling
like rice flung from the giants' wedding,
or the strangest birds. & consider, then,
the right hand, & how it is a fist,
within which a sharpened utensil,
similar to the way I've held a spade,
match to the wick, the horse's reins,
loping, the very fists
I've seen from the roads to Limay & Estelí.
For years, I have come to sit this way:
one hand open, one hand closed,
like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up
the food that comes from that farming.
Or, yes, it is like the way I've danced
with my left hand opened around a shoulder
& my right hand closed inside
of another hand. & how
I pray, I pray for this
to be my way: sweet
work alluded to in the body's position
to its paper:
left hand, right hand
like an open eye, an eye closed:
one hand flat against the trapdoor,
the other hand knocking, knocking.

-Aracelis Girmay
From Teeth by Aracelis Girmay. Copyright © 2007

Cecilia Woloch: Postcard to I. Kaminsky from a Dream at the Edge of the Sea

Postcard to I. Kaminsky from a Dream at the Edge of the Sea

by Cecilia Woloch

 

I was leaving a country of rain for a country of apples. I hadn't much time. I told my beloved to wear his bathrobe, his cowboy boots, a black patch like a pirate might wear over his sharpest eye. My own bags were full of salt, which made them shifty, hard to lift. Houses had fallen, face first, into the mud at the edge of the sea. Hurry, I thought, and my hands were like birds. They could hold nothing. A feathery breeze. Then a white tree blossomed over the bed, all white blossoms, a painted tree. "Oh," I said, or my love said to me. We want to be human, always, again, so we knelt like children at prayer while our lost mothers hushed us. A halo of bees. I was dreaming as hard as I could dream. It was fast—how the apples fattened and fell. The country that rose up to meet me was steep as a mirror; the gold hook gleamed.

It's National Poetry Month, by the way.

Polish Literature: Jerzy Pilch and A Thousand Peaceful Cities.

I love the poetry of Poland: Czeslaw Milosz, (and his eyesbrows;) Wislawa Szymborska and Tadeusz Rozewicz.  And so, I'm really excited about a new translation of Jerzy Pilch's A Thousand Peaceful Cities, by David Frick. The book is a story of a boy's coming of age during the Occupation. It's about Love, Politics, Religion, and Drinking. Open Letter Books shared a pre-release excerpt - I've already purchased two copies. I love this visual narrative:

Chapter IV

"The parchment map of the sky slowly took on life. Streams of deep blue air flowed across it. Golden sand poured from the planets. Within the large constellations you could hear music. I awoke in the middle of the night, and in the dark, gropingly, I recorded in my notebook the word “occupation,” which in a moment someone would whisper in the depths of the sleeping house.

In those days I never parted for a moment with my pencil and notebook. The desire, stronger than anything else, to record words and sentences that had just been or would in a moment be uttered, directed my every step, waking and sleeping. I would place the notebook and pencil on the nightstand, and when the golden-black grandfather clock in the entryway rang out the most terrible of hours, two or three in the morning, when the Antichrist himself touched my featherbed with a wet wing, when during every season of the year an infernal silence reigned, I would reach for notebook and pencil and record the word or sentence that brought relief. “Ocupation,” I wrote, but I didn’t feel relief or consolation. From the kitchen came noises unusual for that hour. Someone was moving a chair. Someone knocked delicately, probably at the window, since the panes rattled. Someone said something. Somebody answered. I lit the lamp, and Mr. Trąba’s voice became more distinct, as if intensified by the light. To this day I am absolutely certain that, throughout my entire childhood, I was awakened from sleep either by Mr. Trąba’s voice, or by the sound of the Wittenberg bells in the church tower.

A few minutes before six in the morning, Sexton Messerschmidt would climb the wooden steps, and in the gray dawn of the fall, in the winter darkness, or with the summer radiance piercing the shutters, the cast-iron caps would begin to move more and more forcefully. In the morning, the sound of the bells was delicate like the slowly rising eyelid of a Lutheran confirmation-class girl. At noon, it possessed the fullness of the fire roaring under Evangelical stovetops. And at twilight, it was mannerly and pliable like the mixed forests on Buffalo Mountain."

The Endurance.

Several years ago I watched a documentary on PBS about the failed Antarctic voyage of Shackleton and his crew. I was trapped in a hotel room, on a business trip, and I was kind of depressed. I hadn't heard of Shackleton, I knew nothing of the Endurance, and I was transfixed by the surviving images and video collected by Frank Hurley.

I have always remembered something from the documentary that was said, almost in passing. A mention that Shackleton's mother had banned fairy tales from the home when he was growing up. She believed that the tropes reproduced in those stories  - of perfect love, happily ever after - ruined the lives of young, impressionable readers who would then spend eternity searching for that idyllic, unattainable state. 

It's interesting to think about, given that hope and possibility had to be two of the drivers that made Shackleton cross miles of freezing water and ice in search of help. And hope and possibility that kept the 28 member crew alive while they waited months, not knowing if Shackleton would ever return to save them.

Snowy Walk.

Blue Heron.

Coyote. I love his natural "camo!"

Hawk.

M. upgraded my digital camera at Christmas, but this was the first weekend I've really had time to play with it. I'm shooting with a Panasonic Lumix FZ35 - 12 megapixels and 18x zoom.

We took a long walk in fresh snow this afternoon - and there was nature. The heron shot is amazing - he did me a favor by standing like a statue until I got my stuff together.

Lisa Qualls: Breath of Ten Thousand Leaves

 

Breath of Ten Thousand Leaves
60 X 67
2007

Cotton, Photo transfers from pages of the Man'yoshu, cigarette holes

lisaqualls.com

Valley of the Monarchs. (Mexico)

Music: Philip Glass.

Shirin Neshat: Women Without Men

Shirin Neshat.Women Without Men (woman knitting), 2004 C-print.  Courtesy of the Gladstone Gallery.

Jack Kerouac's Rules for Spontaneous Prose

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Which one hits you the hardest? Me: Number 20. Number 19. Number 2. Number 9. Number 11.

Olive's Ocean by Kevin Henkes

Every year, I make a point to read a book from the ALA's list of banned or restricted library books. Just to see what it's all about. This year, I'm choosing Olive's Ocean by Kevin Henkes. The book has been restricted in places because of "sexually explicit" and "offensive" language.

The last book I read from this list, Carolyn Mackler's, The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, was controversial because it was considered "anti-family" and "sexually explicit." I thought it was a very real story of a teenage girl's struggle to make some connection in a life where it love was obviously lacking.

Not the portrait of a perfect family, perhaps, but then so many families are "anti-family." Of course, it should be said that I'm not a mother or a young adult reading this stuff for the first time. If I *had* read it at a young age, honestly, I might have found some consolation there.

After I posted about Carolyn Mackler's, The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, I received some of the most interesting comments in the history of the blog, but not about dysfunctional families. Two Kitties readers know a lot about boys. The comments are worth reading, and it isn't too late to add your own.

The Blindside Movie

I saw The Blindside yesterday. I think you should see it too.

Who Wrote The Book of Love?

                The Book of Loves, RatArt Press, Michael Henninger, 2005. Edition of 16.

One thing I observed while shredding my old journals was just how much of my life I have wasted mooning over some boy who was, quite obviously, never going to love me back.

Another thing? That you can fall out of love with someone just like that [ding!]. 

What's written in your Book of Love? 

Bambi by Felix Salten.

The Little Red Hen says that Chapter 8 of Felix Salten's Bambi shares the secret of life in just three pages.

The original Bambi. Not the Disney Bambi.

I anxiously await the arrival of my copy.

Combat Paper: Drew Matott and Drew Cameron

Combat Paper is a collaborative project between artists and soldiers returning from the war in Iraq. Uniforms worn in combat are shredded and beaten to create pulp for handmade paper used for prints and artist books.

The overarching goal of the project is to help veterans reconcile their experiences in the war zone and alter traditional narratives of military service, culture and the re-construction of individual identity on returning home. 

The images you see above are broadside prints from a portfolio created in the Combat Paper studios. Initiated by the artists Drew Matott and Drew Cameron, the Combat Paper project is based out of Green Door Studios in Burlington, Vermont.

Project Facade is another project that explores the tensions war introduces to individual identity. Check out this post from the blog's archives to learn more about Project Facade.

Book Binding How To: John Carrera and His Pictorial Webster's Dictionary

Pictorial Webster's: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

Better Living Through Ventriloquism

I found this little gem while browsing the bookstore. Basically a 'how to' book for using ventriloquism in difficult situations - like during a drug intervention for your best friend. The possibilities are mind boggling.

How to Make a Wreath From Recycled Paper

There is a link on the main page of my blog to a site called Craft Tutorials. You can find everything there - the good, the bad, the simply ugly. Wind chimes made of old measuring cups?

Or this. A wreath made from recycled paper. Vague instructions are here, and photos at the Rag & Bone Book Art blog. I am forever grateful to Craft Tutorials for introducing me to Rag & Bone. 

Edward Hopper: Room In New York (1932)

'Edith, you are a romantic,' he said with a smile....

'But why must I be called a romantic just because I don't see things the same way as you do?'

'Because you are misled by what you would like to believe. Haven't you learned that there is no such thing as complete harmony between two people, however much they profess to love one another? Haven't you realized how much time and speculation are waste, how much mythological agonizing goes on, simply because they are out of phase? Haven't you seen how the light touch sometimes, nearly always, in fact, is more effective than the deepest passion?'

'Yes, I have seen that,' said Edith, sombre.

'Then, my dear, learn to use it. You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish...you must learn to discount the others. Within your own scope you can accomplish much more. You can be self-centered, and that is a marvellous lesson to learn.'

'But if you would prefer to share your life?' asked Edith.

From the novel, Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner.

Tunnel Book Tutorial

I made this rough and tumble tunnel book after seeing a tutorial put together by Extreme Cards and Papercrafting. It's a few photocopies of images from a vintage book and some paper from an old school ledger.

And the tutorial would have been so much more helpful - if I hadn't left it on the kitchen counter. I didn't want to go all the way back to my house so I just guessed at it. As it turns out, the clips would have been extremely helpful. I'm going to try again, and this time, I will definitely bring the directions!

Debra Tomson Williams: A Story About You

Last fall, artist Debra Tomson Williams spent two weeks working in my art studio. She made a series of artist books during her time here.

One of my favorites, A Story About You, is featured in the artist books exhibition Recto Verso at Sweetwater Arts Center.

This accordion file book tells the story of how a genetic condition passes through a family. The show opens on Friday, June 5th.

Nava Atlas Book Art

Sluts and Studs (detail), originally uploaded by Nava Atlas.

I love artist books - its more difficult than you might think to create one. I've never managed to achieve that incredible combination of playful structure, engaging text, and divine visual. It takes planning, anyway.

See more of Nava Atlas' artist books and "readable objects" on her website.

April 30: Poem In Your Pocket Day

On Thursday, we end National Poetry Month with Poem in Your Pocket Day. It's simple: select a poem you love, then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends on April 30, 2009.

Poems from pockets will be unfolded throughout the day with events in parks, libraries, schools, workplaces, and bookstores. The Poets.org website has ideas and classroom activities.

I'm giving you a few days notice so you'll have time to select something. I'm also going to suggest that you photocopy the poem. If someone came up to me with a poem, I'd definitely want to take it home and sip on it with a cup of coffee.

Here is one of my favorites, but I'm not sure it is the right poem for my pocket. It might be this one. Or this one. Please tell us, in the comment section, which poems you might put in your pocket.

First Love

by Yehuda Amichai

I was blind to you when you loved me long ago.

I switched you for another, like Isaac,

for a smell, and a taste, and an appetite for meat,

for a fragrance of the field, and a house, and a little heat.

I have forgotten the words

of the only letter I wrote to you.

All that I remember is the taste of the glue of the stamp

on my tongue.

The fate that determined us was not really

destiny,

but it was as strong and sure as the finger of the violinist

that determines the fate of a note,

though it, too, is as final and as decisive

as death.

 

(Translated, from the Hebrew, by Leon Wieseltier.)

_{Photo credit: Heidi K. Rettig (2008) From the heart shaped rock collection down on our dock.}

Beckoning of Lovely: Amy Krouse Rosenthal

I get to be part of this wonderful project. Stick with it until the end and you will see my name. I'm Heidi, the "host" of the Missing Piece Treaties and the owner of the log cabin.

Brian Dettmer: Altered Books

 Brian Dettmer autopsies books from the top, down.

Australian Literature

I love to send mail by post. Letters are a relic, care packages an archaeological doorstep find. So you can imagine how happy I was to receive this box, all the way from Australia, from my friend J. I had sent him a couple of books a few months ago - two I had finished that I thought he might enjoy. In return, he sent a precious selection:

"I'm sending you this books as a kind of intro to Australian writing. It's hard to know where to start. Should one begin with a 19th century classic? Or with one of the feisty left wing women writers of the 1940s? Or the most recently acclaimed?

In the end, I settled for a Nobel Laureate and the novel of his which I like best: The Aunt's Story. Next comes David Malouf who may well be our next Nobel winner. I chose his very first novel, Johnno, because it is about my home town in the era in which we both grew up. In fact, when it first came out, a friend gave it to me saying simply "It's us." He was right. Finally, Peter Goldworthy's Maestro, which I just enjoy.

After I chose them I realised that they all in their different ways deal with the complex relationship that Australians have with Europe. More then, perhaps, than know. You may recognise some of that in certain generations of Americans.

Both the Brisbane and Darwin described are long gone. Darwin after a Hurricane in 1974. Now rebuilt. Brisbane in the hurricane of development so that is now like Dallas on a river. I hope you enjoy."

And this precious letter begins a new category, and a new week of posts on Good Mail. Stay tuned.

Bathtub IV: Time Lapse Photography of Keith Loutit

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Poet Smackdown: Steven Covey vs. Carol Ann Duffy

In his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey explains the benefits of the Habits:

"In harmony with the natural laws of growth, they provide an incremental, sequential, highly integrated approach to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness. They move us progressively on a Maturity Continuum from dependence to independence to interdependence....they become the basis of a person's character, creating an empowering center of correct maps from which an individual can effectively solve problems, maximize opportunities, and continually learn and integrate other principles in an upward spiral of growth."

This is the kind of management program that would drive me to use crystal meth.

What would the world be like - at work, at home, in conflict and in love - if everyone chose to be polite, but direct? Compare the work of British poet Carol Ann Duffy. There is no doubt about what she is thinking and feeling:

Words, Wide Night

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words .

Think about last week. Would it/Could it have gone any more smoothly if someone (or you) had just been straightforward (but polite) about something that was on your mind?

Easy Digital Photo Craft Project.

For Valentine's Day, I made a photo wall in Mike's office that capture some of his favorite memories of Montana. I came across the idea in the book, PhotoCraft.

It was simple and easy to do. I went to a discount store and bought a packet of slim, empty CD jewel case and a yard of sticky back velcro tape. I printed 5 x7's on the photo printing machine then trimmed them up and assembled the look in one evening. Total cost? About $15.

The jewel cases and velcro make it quick and easy to change the photos or re-arrange them. A perfect gift for anyone in your life - just choose some meaningful photos and go for it!

How to Knit a House for Your Hamster

Crack two kitties reader Jamie spotted this beauty yesterday in the New York Times. You must be as stunned as I was when I first saw the photo.

You can find this hamster house pattern, along with dozens of other fabulous, simple projects in the new book, Pet Projects, The Animal Knits Bible. 

According to the article, the hamster lived in the house for a day. And then he ate it.

Ray Materson Prison Sock Embroidery

This weekend I've been reading God of the Rodeo: The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana's Angola Prison. It is a kind of ethnography. Journalist Daniel Bergner was granted unusual access to inmates by Warden Cain and delivers a candid anthropology of this prison community rich with thick description:

"..his short, wiry body was covered with tattoos. The spiderweb was among the smallest. An animal half lion and half monster, with a mane of fire, occupied most of his back. A viking dominated his chest, a helmeted woman his shoulder. From hip to hip across the bottom of his back, in fancy calligraphy, a tattoo read: LOUISIANA CRACKER.

For each of these he had paid a convict artist to burn a plastic canister, usually of Speed Stick, with a paper bag held over the plastic to catch the rising soot. Scraped from the paper, the soot was mixed with toothpaste and water to make the ink. A steel guitar string was threaded through an empty pen shaft. The artist rigged a tiny motor, taken from a cassette player, to jab the steel string thousands and thousands of times into Cook's skin.."

How to make something from nothing. The tenacity of the Angola tattoo artist reminded me of this piece, installed in a show I saw at the American Visionary Art Museum a few years ago.

The artist, Ray Materson, learned to embroider while he was serving time for a felony drug conviction. He rigged an embroidery hoop from the top of an old plastic tub and stitched with hypodermic needles scored from the prison drug trade. Materson unraveled socks to make thread and swapped with other prisoners for needed colors.

Using this steam punk assembly of tools, Materson spent his 15 years in jail embroidering tiny illustrations of his life story. The photograph doesn't capture the mastery of the work. Each piece is tiny - 2" x 2", 1200 stitches per square inch. Flawless; precise.