it's official

the scrap city website is up! check it out:
www.inspiredtype.com/scrapcity.
wahoo! i am so excited to see this damn book!
supposedly mine is on its way.
can't wait to see it.
can't wait, can't wait, can't wait....

drunk on afternoon sunshine

had monday off... spent it in the city...
shopping and visiting and
laying around in washington square park, people-watching in the sunshine...
kinda hoped it'd fix my jones
but it's official:
i miss my home so bad my teeth hurt.
i'm ready to make promises to god:
if you let me move home, i swear
i will never bitch about the summer heat
or the way you have to wear boots every single day in winter
fashion be damned because of that bone-crunching cold
(that isn't colder than in the suburbs, it's only that in new york city,
unless you are extremely rich, you are out in the elements a lot. )
and i promise that i will love
that you have to walk every day,
three, four, five miles
to and from the subway
underground in the tunnels
to and from work
and you do it fast
and because of this your ass isn't as fat as your diet would suggest it should be.

i miss my tall brooklyn windows

and how you could see the empire state building from the rooftop at 156 Quincy St

and the dinosaur sculptures in our front yard.

and i miss the crackle in the the air that happens there

and nowhere else.

i miss it so much.
the street-songs, the good shoes,
the waitstaff that isn't gonna be perky so drink your coffee or fuck off, lady, i don't care which.

by hook or by crook, folks. by hook or by crook.

oh, mean girls.

so i love the movie 'mean girls'. i have a minor crush on tina fey, and she looks totally hot in it. and there are all the fun cameos and the girls who play the plastics are very fun and i totally buy lindsay lohan’s story. and so tonight i’m laying around watching it for like the 3rd time since i bought it on sale on Saturday, and maybe it’s just that i’ve seen it so many times in so few days that the patterns are starting to pop out and i’m seeing something i feel like i need to work out: mean girls is anti-lesbian? how weird.

let me spout: so there’s damian the super-queer. and he’s adorable, i love him like i love my very own queer boys. but we can’t forget that he’s gay by way of stereotypical femme presentation, not by way of sexuality. he’s absolutely sex-less. i don’t think he expresses a single iota of desire once in the entire movie. (though now that i’m saying that, i want to go back and watch the movie again and check that out for real, see if he doesn’t cast a bedroom eye at someone.) and of course, he does have the vanity thing going on, as well as the penchant for show tunes and an awesome bitchy-girl side.

and then there’s Janice. i love Janice. i really do. she’s an awesome artist and i like her style and she’s totally f-ing hot (those eyes?! holy shit, i’m weak-kneed). but let’s examine the issues here. she is highly female-centric in that she exists in an almost man-less circle, given damian’s neutered persona. and at one point, when cady is referring to regina’s appearance, Janice’s comment is about how regina’s “got pretty big jugs” now that she’s putting on weight. hmm…

and there are no less than three occasions in the movie where damian attempts to tell cady why Janice hates regina so much, and each time Janice silences him. then, when cady reads that the Plastics think Janice is a dyke, cady refuses to tell Janice that. instead she lies and says that Janice wasn’t mentioned at all. her actions show us that to cady, being called a dyke is so bad she can’t even say it to her friend. and to Janice, being called a dyke is so bad that she can’t even have it mentioned to her friend that that is the reason she hates regina. hmm…

and then, just to top it all off, when cady enters the Halloween party and the voiceover is talking about how girls dress like sluts on Halloween in America, dead-ahead there are two girls dressed in slutty gear, making out in a doorway. and though these high schoolers are supposedly so gay-friendly that damian’s sexuality is apparently fine by everyone, cady definitely gives the making-out girls a weird “what the hell is going on here?” look.

hmm… i feel like this movie is having a strange relationship with the gay folk. i love this movie. it kind of hurts my feelings.

he's ready for his close-up

so last sunday was the most lovely afternoon and me and chazzard had a photo shoot in the yard. it was so fun. he is starting to be pretty chill on his leash again. it's been pretty hard to regain all our lost ground since we moved to the suburbs. see, in brooklyn, our backyard was really enclosed and only connected to other backyards, so he felt safe even though the sky was bigger than the ceiling (a continuous issue for chaz). but out here in the country, even in the back-yard chaz can hear cars and trucks and they freak him out a little. also, i think cause there's so much stuff here for him to climb in and on and under, he wants to frolick more than his leash will allow. but he also has a neurotic mother who knows that he is perfectly capable of getting scared and running under something large and getting stuck and so refuses to let him off his leash. anyway, we were playing with afternoon light and my [love it but don't really know how to use it] camera. chazzard is the most handsome fellow, and he's quite the willing little subject. he thinks he's a supermodel.

art journal day

so there is something cosmic going on. piskies afoot or some such. strange things have been occurring. gifts being handed to folks who don't know they need them.

i had a play-date with my friend kristi and such things are so good for the soul. making art with, and talking-making-art with other art-making-folks is so new and cool for me. most of my creative work is done in the middle of the night in my little studio all alone with maybe chazz trying to steal buttons or something but that is the extent of my usual level of creative collaboration. and it's not like we were critiquing or getting involved in each other's projects, really, it's just that there is good energy in the air. anyway, the point of the story is that kristi showed me her art journal and said 'i really think you should start one' and i said uh-huh and then today i was having a very cranky day and feeling rage-ish and stifled and messy and purple and i found an old book in my collection of old books and it was called "good morning, young lady" and so i began an art journal and it is so fun. all that messy is good for my soul in a different way than scrapping. this is a new thing, it reminds me of the really intricate notes and doodles my friends and i wrote each other and made for each other when we were in middle school. we folded notes into shapes: squares, triangles. i wrote around the perimeters of pages. made flowers of paragraphs. nad mine were not the most wonderful. i remember: lisa harmon and her handwriting, coils of letters in alternating colors. kristen pufahl's perfect script. it's so odd, what we keep.

here is a page from my art journal. the quote is from a splendid drag queen named Ms. Guy and it says: "I'm not a gay icon in the way Bette Midler is, and I don't necessarily want to be. But if all the Chelsea queens thought I was the shit, that'd be fine too."

i'm feeling old today, and young, and cranky and tired and messy and mousy and i'm making a book about it. tee hee. i love art.

thanks, k. you get a big hug. the chocolate cupcake didn't hurt either :)