and the Phampersand Press
(missed last week’s because I was out of town… I’ll try to make it a regular Thing though!)
If you’re in or near Philly, do stop by Art Star and check out new crafty warez from many members of the Charm City Craft Mafia, and my friends Leah Mackin and Julianna Lose! Good luck guys, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for beautiful weather for y’all. xo
I had an insane whirlwind of a weekend and want to gush all about it, namely Jenny Holzer at the Whitney and easy-breezy-Philly, but I’ve had a bit of a family emergency that could interfere with my ability to blog regularly for a time. So meanwhile, check out some links I’ve been digging these days:
Who doesn’t love school supplies? Pencil Blog
My favorite art blog these days Bright Stupid Confetti (noticing lots of Bmore and Philly artists there, <3)
JP Art Brut(e)
happy clicking… will be back blogging when I can clear the mental space.
I blog elsewhere. (Horror of horrors.)
I’ve been blogging at Elsewhere since 2002. (Shock of shocks.)
So I have this other Gurnal and maintain it for a variety of reasons… it’s a place to start/false-start a lot of my ideas, there’s admittedly a degree of brand-loyalty considering I’ve had it for so long, and I have a high level of control over the filters and reader-access. These days, it’s more brainstorming and rambling than anything, but it’s great to have a place where I can dump Feelings, whine about whatever is plaguing me for the week, reflect on former flames/flings, stress about the inner-workings of my personal life… basically it houses the thoughts I want to share with a veryveryvery select group of friends, some thoughts that I wouldn’t want strangers to read.
That said, I totes spazzed about some awesome news I got last night and I thought it would only be appropriate to share, publicly, how I spazzed about it, semi-privately. (and you will read it, and you will see why I don’t blog the way I do here, because it is intended for that tiny pool of friends, without scrutiny)
I had the pleasure of camping with some good pals this weekend in western MD. Some of us had been itching to go for a while, and what began as lack of any plans other than drinking and roasting foods over fire turned into a tri-state ridiculathon in Virginia, West Virginia, slots, and mud. I’ll spare you the vague inside jokes and just add that despite a few detours here and there, it was so, so, so nice to be away someplace quiet, no agenda or schedule, just trees and birds and misty air and mud. A smattering of pictures:
This Friday’s shout-out goes to the awesome stylists at Sprout Salon on the Avenue in Hampden.
Look. I don’t spend much time on my hair, but I am still picky about who gets to bring haircutting implements anywhere near these tresses. I was getting my haircut by my aunt at Imagination Salon in Rockville for yeeeears (really, almost 20 years), but with my schedule and my choice for a shorter ‘do, it was just becoming too much of a hike.
I don’t splurge on too much, but a fine-ass haircut is worth it to me, especially because I’m too lazy to go in for frequent touch ups. I was really apprehensive about going to someone new, god forbid they mess up something that GROWS BACK… But so many of my friends go to Sprout and I couldn’t think of any other place that I’d trust. I just had my second cut with my stylist Leah, and let me just say: I am a converted worshipper and don’t plan on going anywhere else besides the House of Sprout.
Like for real though: it’s all cute and bamboo-y inside, and they have a ton of modern hair magazines to look through, not the ones full of Mom Haircuts. And then, AND THEN, the hairwashing experience: this sweet, kind of stoic peaceful girl sits you down, offers you green tea or cool spring water, rubs some organic minty oil stuff between her hands and massages your scalp for 10 minutes while she asks you about your day. and then you get shampooed and you get a SECOND conditioning scalp massage. Did I happen upon Wat Pho for a total Buddhist massage experience? Sadly, no, but it felt pretty damn close.
And then the stylist… like she listens to me ramble on about “well not quite like this… but like a little longer, but then after 2 weeks it looks like this and I don’t like that, but you do you think it would look good kind of like this? and can you fix my bangs? and make me into a fairy princess?” and then she tinkers at my hair this way and that way, tells me about her life drama and asks me about mine, tinker tinker, shape, razor, snip, twist, tinker tinker, and then puts the smelly good organic styling wax all up onz, and you are all done and you feel like a million bucks.
I’ve been following the Jezebel vs. DoubleX (well, Jezebel-awesomeness vs. Linda Hirshman) debates pretty closely, this back and forth of Moe and Tracy essentially Handing It to her, and then, gloriously, some DoubleX writers agreeing and moving the debate even more forward (my favorite zinger, “With fellow feminists like this, who needs the patriarchy?”)… but anyway, through a series of meta-clicking, I found some great reads on kyriarchy, a better and more progressive take on Hirshman’s take on “intersectionality”, and this amazing and informative blog, Muslima Media Watch. Check ‘em out!
Today is my mother’s 50th birthday. She doesn’t read this, but in her honor, here’s a little something that I’ve been working on…
I’m teaming with a local printer to re-edition/package a body of work via giclee prints. I want to rework the enclosures, I think, which are originally hand-dyed tyvek folios in a slipcase, all with little de-laminated squares. I really like that edition as a package, and that the folios pull out in no order as a pairing with the non-linear, non-timed vignettes… but as I revisit the structure, I think they should be something else. I also want to combine these vignettes with the extra-long offset/Japanese cloth book I editioned about my father’s story of running. maybe a diptych box? Thinking critically about book arts, I love/hate box books, so that’s something else to consider. Qualifiers aside, this is actually supposed to be a snippet of that project. Here are some excerpts. Images inside are just context, not the original edition images. (can’t give everything away now, can I?) Continue reading ‘Words from the same space’
Current obsession: installations by Gerda Steiner and Torg Lenzlinger. I love these projects so much, I’m taking them out of my Tumblr dump. I’m not even going to resize this image.
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