home again home again jiggety-jig

Our room! Red and green and skull-laden. Hurrah!

The kitchen window sill, with unicorn bell and beer bottle with balanced eggshell.
I made myself this pink hat out of lining material. I think I like it, though I'm more of a rusty-orange type person.

Hello, I'm from a "Generation"

Dollek (my name for it, haha) by Mimi Kirchner

I am often amused lately about how "craft" is becoming so big and seemingly taking over the world and spare time of every woman and girl (& some guys too) in America (not just me). I'm not sure if this is an impression caused by my sort-of addiction to craft blogs, or the sudden blossoming of knitting stores that cater to upper-middle class women with some time on their hands, or my time wandering the aisles of Beverley fabrics and realizing that they had to knock down a wall and add a new wing.
I sometimes have a hard time discerning if something is actually a craze or if it is just where my attention is directed.
The idea that a craft revolution might be happening was solidifyed yesterday by our attendance at the Make Faire, a fair in San Mateo where DIY types of all stripes gathered to show off their robots (men) and handmade recycled fashion (women)*. The whole place was filled with putterers, basement geniuses, revolutionary recyclers, mad scientists, and people who must keep busy making things of intelligence and/or beauty and/or function (or things that shoot huge balls of fire) ALL THE TIME. Basically, Mykle and I fit right in.
I didn't have anything to do with any booth or anything, so as a secret nod to my craftiness I wore a skirt and earrings that I made. (Sometimes I take handmade roll-call on myself and realize that hat, jewelry, wallet, scarf, t-shirt and haircut are all selfcrafted and that's when I feel most like me). There were people there of all ages, but the fact that something like this (the fair) is happening NOW makes me feel like some part of a generation. What was in the water around the 70's when we were all born? Why has the urge to Do It Yourself inate in some of us? I admit that a large part of America is obsessed with buying things they DIDN'T have anything to do with the production of, and so that craftiness and "product-hacks" and making your own LED bicycle wheel are probably all reactions to this.

I need to take some pictures of the billion knitted things I made this winter (mainly while siting on the beanbag watching Buffy with Michelle and Orion). I need to maybe stop being such a craft dilletante (I have gone from crocheting silk string flowers to knitting lace with mohair to coiled silver spiral earrings to fake-flower hairclips to a growing obsession with felting and making my own cloche. This is in the last 4 or so months) and settle on one thing so I can make a bunch and perhaps sell them. I KNOW that I won't stop making stuff, right? Might as well be a good Capitalist and try to profit from it.

The Make Faire was utterly inspiring in a way. If I am going to be part of a "Generation" I would be proud to have it be one like this. A return to cottage industry combined with high-tech communication tools. Yup.

Next post I swear will be all mouth-watering poetry and luscious paintings and no sense at all!!

Look at Insructables and Craftster to get an idea of all this. Both are awesome sites, with SO MUCH INFORMATION!

*a joke about the gender differences at the faire. Grown-up boys still largely seem to go for robots and grown-up girls go mostly for dolls.

Flickring images

Flickr has some amazing photos on it.

Birds dead from flying into windows

Amusement parks around Detroit taken with a plastic camera

Love portraits taken with a toy camera (Black and White)

Delicate paperdolls

Ghostly fairytale altered images

May Fowler among the chickens

longhair (MayFowler)
Originally uploaded by kai smart.

As far as I can tell, this is my great great aunt, who possessed some serious rippling tresses. Look at her little boots! And the chickens!

I like old family photos that are a bit out of the ordinary. They let you get a glimpse that people were people, even then. Your great grandparents were silly, had sex, burped, cried, and had doubts and fears like all of us. The stiff formal portraiture of the past makes this hard to comprehend sometimes.

Ryan Rinker had this amazing picture of his grandfather and grandfather's friends goofing around in a very homoerotic way with a bayonet (I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that), all while dressed up in their army uniforms. Very strange and funny.

Once I was looking at pictures with Mum, my paternal grandma, and stuck right in the family album were pictures of heaps of dead bodies stacked like cordwood in some islandish place. They were taken by a relative who was in the Korean war, she explained. Then we turned the page and went on...to more pictures of mother's with babies and shiny family cars; my paternal great grandmother with her huge potatoish lumpy face like a man's.

Now it's not only photographs, we leave our mark digitally all over the place. The "Dead people on Myspace" website (and recent stalking murders started through web forums like Myspace and Friendster and Livejournal) makes me wonder how long things like this- blogs, personal websites, community forums, online communities, etc- will last and if or when they will become like graveyards. Maybe they should have an automatic profile deletion when the normal human lifespan runs out, or 100 years have passed. I'm not one of those tech visionaries who sees innovations in the digital future, so this might be ill-informed (and morbid) speculation. If so, please illuminate me. And don't say that soon we will all have the internet in our brains and we will be able to "jack into the mainframe" by winking our left eye. William Gibson is one of my favorite authors in the world. You can't pull anything on me.

Mean and Mischevious

Hahahaha.
I'm sitting here posting in my blog on Saturday night, while Mykle stares at me since he thinks we are about to go to the Rush Inn!
OK, now he's reading a small paperback called "Loving Someone Gay", so I guess I have a few more minutes.

We went home today, briefly, and it was wonderful. Our apartment is cluttered and haphazard, with all the cluttered and haphazard things being things that I made; my wonderful paintings, dolls, my long-suffering houseplants, dirty giant stuffed unicorns, etc.
Is it strange to love my own paintings so much? I really don't feel like I'm being vain; I created them in MY own imperfect vision of beauty. They are what I want to see when I look around. Is that wierd? I love the big red fortune telling hand that I cut out of plywood with my skillsaw (yes, mine) in the backyard of Rigg St. one fall day. ("Loving Someone Gay" seems to be quite a humourous book!) I love my abstract "Narcotic Sleep Painting" (no one knows it's called that since I painted out the words. It is here) that has a bit of paper peeling off of it. Everyone thinks it's intentional and I say "Oh yes of course"! No actually I tell the truth.
Home.
Michelle was there, and had just washed the floor and her massage table was out and the heater was on, and she was playing Michelle Music (recognized by it's sultry nature, swirly gothiness, and sleepy ambiance), and it was lovely. She rescues plants from the streets and nurses them back to health, repotting them and worrying over them.

It's strange to live in a place where you can't just walk out the door with a trowel to get dirt for your potted plant. You have to buy it.

Music: The new Cat Power is gorgeous. So is the Fiona Apple. The new Matt Bauer EP, aclled "Wasps and White Roses" (go to his website) is amazing and has great graphic design, which he did himself, and the man it quite a poet, as well as being a hell of a nice guy. I love the song "Sea Lion Woman".
TV: Battlestar Galactica is a fucking amazing show, yes I mean the new one, and I'm serious. It's our new obsession, and we watch it all pirated off the web, so sorry no one can probably see it besides the internet outlaw types. Try, though!

Clouded Corneas

Ceaseless rainy days pile into each other softly, with the sounds of flannel and fire in the grate. My muscles want spring to be here, they are cramped and useless, but some part of me is made for the introspective muffled quiet of a dark afternoon, where your only company is the boy you love (reading) and the smooth slide of wooden needles through fairy-green mohair yarn.
Of course, one craft is not enough for a professional putterer like me, and so I have been buying silver wire and beads of glass and bone, and making coiled and beaded earrings. I thirst to make things (and I've recently discovered I can wear earrings again, if they are really good metal). It's the only thing that satisfies me most times. How strange, in a way. Doing crafty stuff isn't really expressing anything, like painting or journalling or illustration. It's just a sensual excercise; I recently bought yarn made from silken threads that are discarded from sari factories in Nepal. The knotted ball of yarn tugs at me, the colors are so vivid and knotted and beautiful. I like color combinations that make my pupils refocus. Does this happen to you? You can physically feel your eyes adjust when you look at them.

I want all this beauty etched into my corneas!

We have lapsed into that peculiar Kai-and-Mykle sleep schedule that is half day and half night. We wake around 12 noon, and stay up till 2 or 3 in the morning. I would usually miss mornings, but the time of day is obscured by thick weeping skies and intermittent white hazy light breaking through.

SC in the rain and shine

When people ask me what the best thing about New Zealand was I say, "Seeing Mykle again." It had nothing to do with NZ, it was just the place we happened to be. It was a green and growing place, but it could've been the desert for all I cared. Just to see his skin and his wild eyes and his solid shoulders again, that's all that mattered. We grin like fools and blow kisses at each other.
Now we are here in the comfort and sleepy rainy town of Santa Cruz. Today is the rare second day of sun, the air is still cool, but the sky is blinding blue. Last night felt like summer; we got fish tacos and margaritas at Palomar, walked to the cafe and sat on the sprawling Victorian porch. The world walked by and joined us at our table. I was stuck inside one of those social confrontations where I am hapy and stoked to be among large groups of my friends, but have nothing to say. When I am not outgoing people ask me what is wrong. That's just the side effect of being a social-butterfly-motormouth most of the time. To think- I used to be PAINFULLY shy! It went along with my "sheltered and scared of everything" theme. I would get scared of a "feeling" I had about a place. I would get scared of a person, because I was poking around in their parent's woodshed and found a horror paperback novel. I would never sleep at a house again because I heard that a person who formerly lived there didn't like children. Every person was potentially a hitchhiker-killer, or more frighteningly, someone who might get mad at me and call me a name. A name like "stupid". Yikes.
I digress, as usual. I am blessed to have so many wonderful people in my life, and to usually have so much to say to them.

I am excited; my dear Michelle is probably coming down this weekend to enjoy the soft carpet (I must lie on it ALL THE TIME, in front of the fireplace while knitting; you can see we have been enduring the rain in style), the beautiful dripping gardens, the banks of clouds and wet streets. Staying here is so wonderful, every dish has it's place, we have somewhere to cook for people who have fed us a million times....I guess this is what it's like to live in an actual house. Who knew I would ever appreciate having "space to entertain". We are so adult now, instead of buying a 12 pack of beer and ordering a pizza, Mykle roasts a chicken and we have wine and candles surrounding our meals. It's classy.

ENTERTAINING MYSELF: I just bought the new Fiona Apple and the new Cat Power albums. I'll let you know how they are.
I am STILL reading "The Last Six Million Seconds". It's great, but hard to read if you leave it in your friends car for a week.
We saw V is for Vendetta on Sunday with Pete, Lucia, Cooper, Jordan, Dana, Jesse and Evan (Whew!). I sincerely cried twice. Once was during the exact scene in the book where I burst into tears while reading it on the airplane. It's pretty good, the movie is. The hero of the book is a terrorist who blows up government buildings. Needless to say, it's sort of shocking that this move was MADE in this day and age.
I finished knitting my caterpillar-fur headband, and now am going to try lacy stuff done with a misty leaf-green mohair I got in New Zealand.
I have to stop this computer stuff. If I am on Mykle's laptop for longer that 15 minutes he starts getting antsy. Haha!