12.31.23 [on the F train]

i spent the last of the morning setting out the final, top row of pieces to conclude the first stage of my pandemic english paper piecing quilt, a project that might actually have been simmering since 2019, now that i think about it—i bought some of the fabric for it when i was on st. croix for agrifest in february of 2020, and it was well underway by then. this portion is one of the loveliest for me—i've carried up from the waterline flash of sunset fire up to billowing clouds pieced with sherbet-colored liberty fabric, then bled those hues into bolts of darkening sky that becomes grey cosmic whorls and, finally, graphic black-and-white hexes that feel a bit like regolith liberated from a moon's gravity, or what a lithographer like jacques hnizdovsky would see in his mind's eye if he stargazed on a shore. the foot of the quilt features abstracted and rearranged grey-and-black koi on kimono fabric mixed in with some of my favorite hand-drawn blues to give the look of tide and pools mixing it up on a rocky shore, and at first i thought the final row at the top would include a bit more of those dusty floral greys, but i think that conclusion of unbroken darkness–or lightlessness, maybe—is fitting, as i for one don't know what comes next. i remember sewing that cartwheeling horizon together on a long-gone new year's eve and thinking: something is afoot.

we humans haven't been beyond lower earth atmosphere, where the international space station does donuts around our planet, since the early '70s, a factoid i don't imagine many non-scientists think about too often. fungi hae also been that far in recent years–we and fungi, out there deciding what we're going to do about cosmic radiation and what our next shelters will look like. i'd like to sew the last hexes in place tonight.

02.13.23 [on the F and B trains]

i've started back in on piecing my pandemic quilt, which is something i'd put on hold when steve was declining this fall and winter since it probably can't be laundered ever (i didn't even prelaunder any of my fabric!) and definitely can't be laundered until i finish sewing it together. i beat myself up about that, in my magical thinking i was harming him by trying to limit his sickness's impact on our stuff, and i know how dumb that sounds, but what can you do? he was the smartest cat i've ever known, and i felt like he knew what i was doing most of the time. i also fear that he didn't understand our calling the vet to the apartment last tuesday at all and that i fucked up the one thing i could give him at the end of his life, because grief is body-checking me to the worst places right now. i hope it gives me room to get to useful pieces as i draft the piece on cats i now owe my editor at the end of the month instead of today, but i won't feel like a failure if it doesn't. kidding! i always feel like i fail my animals, especially in situations like this one.

the pandemic quilt–or the top of the pandemic quilt, anyway, i don't yet know how i'll bind and back it–is now about the size of a twin bed coverlet. matty already nests in it while i'm working, as steve once did, which makes the sewing trickier but is otherwise restorative for both of us. i've now incorporated fabrics from an agricultural festival on st. croix, a vintage shop in new haven, a bunch of fat quarter bundles from liberty when we were in london, and a place in philly's fabric district; it's not the rothko-inspired, super-disciplined design i originally had in mind, but its new maximalism has suited the way my headspace has cauliflowered over the past few years.

after my midtown doctor's appointment i swung down through hell's kitchen to see our old pet store, which partners with a local rescue group to host adoptable cats that i was going to appreciate as a casual passerby and then definitely leave behind. they did not have any cats, other than a new-to-me shop cat; they did have an OG staffer who recognized me from across the room ("oh my god, i remember you!"). it's been 14 years since we packed up for the lower east side! the old petland up and around the corner on ninth avenue is now an orangetheory, which must boost our former little pet shop, and good for them. does the shop owner now run into his customers there like he did with me at the janky bally total fitness under worldwide plaza all those years ago? (that wasn't the guy i saw today.) i took an escalator down to take a lap through our old food emporium and talked cats with a cashier at our old health foood market. its natural licorice selection has become even more magnificent.

01.03.23

CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.

bones and all (film). i have loved mark rylance's weird magic ever since i saw his shakespeare-on-broadway double-header (twelfth night's viola one night, richard iii's richard the next!) almost a decade ago, so i would have itched to see this knowing only that he was part of it; i also love joy division's "atmosphere," which promos and the film itself use beautifully and, c'mon, timmy chardonnay as a star-crossed cannibal in a luca guadagnino movie? so much to delight. the cinematography is gorgeous, and i loved the little nods to fraught road movies like badlands (which wowed us at a lovely theater in philly when we spent a weekend there for a friend's wedding this fall). as in call me by your name, guadagnino's last set-in-the-'80s doomed love story starring timothée chalamet, the needle drops are fantastic throughout (along with joy division, there's new order, george strait, a-ha's "the sun always shines on tv," a track that should propel every movie henceforth and be recut into all archives*). i'm now reading the camille deangelis YA novel adapted for the movie, which the author herself has said is not her favorite work? digging into how the story changed is entertaining, even though i'm dreadful at fiction and would never write or adapt it myself.

guillermo del toro: crafting pinocchio (exhibit). it would never have occurred to me to see if moma was open on new year's day; why on earth would moma be open on new year's day? hats off to my sister for asking the tough questions so that she could introduce her sons to jackson pollack** and friends; we had two o'clock tickets for the museum on the first and it was delightful. it also would not have occurred to me to go up there for a guillermo del toro show, for while seeing his stuff up close is delightful (i quite enjoyed at home with monsters at lacma back in 2016, also with jo and my older nephew when he was puppet-sized), i sort of figured another exhibit would be more of the same - and i didn't love nightmare alley, his last project i'd seen. but! this joint was organized during film production, and it did a bang-up job of highlighting all the painstaking work that goes into stop-motion animation and del toro's characteristic world-building. jo's sons are six and four, and i think a lot of the show went over their heads, but i think it would blow a crafty tween's mind; if i'd seen that stuff when i was a sprout i'd be a tattoo artist or/and a necromancer today. i also loved the big wall of photos and titles at the end of the exhibition highlighting all of the artisans and technicians that worked on the movie; the whole presentation deconstructs and celebrates passion projects in a way that makes visitors want to make complicated stuff and support other makers. bonus points for making pinocchio about fascist italy! it's time to bring (talking about the horrors of) fascism back.

splat midnight jade (hair dye). my hair has been various shades of platinum-to-plantain blonde and medium-to-light blue for the last few years; since it never gets more than an inch or two long, i bleach and dye all of it without messing around with sectioning and root touchups. i'm pretty good at it! this stuff was supposed to turn my hair an unprecedented dark green, which felt like a festive angle from which to approach the winter. in practice it's vivid cobalt that sizzles into darkness at at the edges, and it runs down my temples and cheekbones when it gets wet two full weeks after application and several enthusiastic shampoos, so when i get caught in the rain i'm a cross between a blue morpho and rudy giuliani (but the good news is that i have some information that will blow the 2020 election wide open). this dye is not the right dye for me! tantalizing teal (and its soul-frying powder bleach) remains the chemical headsuit to beat.


*i really, really love a-ha. it still saddens me that that my trombone champ "take on me" endorsement didn't make it into that new york times newsletter i was talking about two weeks ago, but they did this, and: heh.

**her sons were unimpressed with jackson pollack. they couldn't get enough of yoko ono's film no. 4, though.

01.01.21

2021: THE YEAR IN REVIEW
i bought razor blades, soap, and kitty litter.
i arranged the second row of the quilt i started sewing together last night, then cut and basted fabric for a bunch of new pieces.
i went for a walk and picked up a prescription for joe.
i listened to a baxter dury record.
i switched pokémon go buddies.
i took some recycling downstairs.

06.11.20

i run into M, a retired firefighter who worked as a personal trainer in our building's fitness room in the before times. he used to give me shit about not seeing me in there every day, and i would tell him about the international work trips that took me away from our treadmills and tv news (i pitched my friend the fitness magazine editor-in-chief a piece about angry running a couple of years ago, but i think it seemed too unhealthy, and that was right about when another publisher was acquiring her title, anyway). now he gives me shit about the days we don't run into him on the promenade, and i tell him that most of my workout is up at the track at 10th street. as always, he tells me that he gets terribly bored when he runs in a circle. M and i differ in a number of ways, but that, somehow, is the gulf of note: running in a circle is the 2020 version of afternoons at skateway in the late eighties when i'd get so excited about janet jackson that i'd slam into the carpeted wall on tight turns. the boys-only-on-the-rink songs were no problem, i'd just take my big earrings off and stick them in my pocket. a guy brought an amp to the bleachers this sunday and cranked "let's dance," which faded into "billie jean." i've always loved watching people succumb to sets, but watching runners try to play it cool through a shitload of, like, billy ocean and hall and oates was especially delightful.

two nearly-identical dogs on st. mark's this evening were both named lucy; pro jazz ensembles are playing for tips in tompkins square park. i have gotten over the fact that i forgot "sectional" as i filed yet another piece on living rooms a few weeks ago ("OH GOD JOE WHAT DO YOU CALL A LONG COUCH IN PIECES") and have learned the difference between a sideboard and a credenza; if i don't keep the world up to date on the latest in open-concept living spaces, internets, my god, who will. i thought about instagramming a wax print fabric i bought from a ghanaian woman in st. croix a few months ago and have been working into my huge, ongoing quilting project and worried that i couldn't talk about how a chinese company produced it. i might email the social worker who hooked me up with my neighbors to let her know that i need to stop doing their shopping, maybe, perhaps at the end of the month. i keep thinking of this man's posture.

07.16.19

the dirty dozen {recurring dreams}

01 the kitten will die if someone doesn't do something
02 we have to leave new york city
03 y kant lauren type
04 time is running out in san francisco, but what about a burrito
05 accidental commitment to grad school
06 iceland
07 david bowie and i have the talk
08 this whole apartment must be painted and furnished
09 no traffic on the service road
10 pregnancy
11 swimming as shortcut
12 punching donald trump

06.22.15

ROAD TRIP UPDATE: IV {17:55, phoenix}

my sister-in-law brought our elfin redheaded nephew over from the other side of town last night. due to start kindergarten in the fall and gloriously pre-haircut, quentin was an occasional glimpse of ringlets behind his dad's knees for his first few hours here; he hasn't seen us since the winter before last, and we're meeting all over again. when he crept out and showed a bit of interest in an origami set we found on a shelf of board games, we racked our brains for middle-school memories: his mom made him a cootie catcher, i tried to recall the little paper balloons my best friend and i would fold and inflate, and joe half-remembered a paper airplane. the only stiff piece of standard paper we could find was a copy of joe's resume that he'd left in his carry-on bag and had been using for notes on phone calls, so wings it became. the airplane was the big winner, of course; ill-creased as it was, it swooped over the lawn like a maddened fly. quentin was instantly enchanted and shriek-giggled as he chased each wonky flight; who doesn't trust and love uncle joe the plane-chucker?

joe squinted to re-fold a busted wing in the afternoon's waning light. "this is the best response my resume has ever gotten."

08.25.14

i'm a really lousy multitasker, so it's terribly exciting when i manage to pull off something like rolling into a friend's daughter's first birthday party with a handmade gift and a big weekender full of clothes for an international press trip.* behold your sock dog, wee violet! i'm martha sandiego or carmen stewart or something! i'd been staying up late reading the first two books in laini taylor's daughter of smoke & bone trilogy, though, and i managed to sew one of the poor little sockshund's forelegs ninety degrees past the direction in which it should have faced; thematically appropriate for the series, but potentially disturbing for a stuffed animal.

this laini taylor trilogy: you know of it, yes? last week i was reading a think piece on supernatural YA fiction—not that new yorker piece on dystopias, another one i can't seem to find now—that name-checked taylor's stuff with glowing praise. that's just the sort of thing i should check out from the library and read on the subway and at three in the morning so i'm not tempted to bring it on the plane to reykjavik and squander hours in which i should be resting up for my one half-day of free time, i thought, and i was right! i don't want to say too much about the plot, as it features some excellent surprises, but i will say that it revolves around karou, a seventeen-year-old blue-haired art student in prague who was raised by devils who collect teeth. like john cry-your-face-off green,** taylor has a knack for dialogue that's both smart and plausible; it's particularly enjoyable as the story gets weirder and the conversations shift from gossip in a local cafe to other topics in other places. she's also fantastic at tucking supernatural flourishes into previously-conventional settings, à la neil gaiman's wonderful london underground in neverwhere. she also also burdens her heroine with brutal consequences for seemingly-trivial decisions, as philip pullman does with lyra in the his dark materials trilogy, and has a stunning, kelly-link-esque imagination.*** it's probably terribly lazy to describe an author primarily by comparing her to other authors—here's a diligent review if you'd prefer one—but in my defense, i think reference points can be particularly useful when one is clattering around in this subgenre. there are walls full of supernatural YA at what remains of brick-and-mortar bookstores, and trails of names are handy when the covers all look the same (these books, i'll warn you, have silly covers). on silly, i was prepared to fling daughter of smoke & bone from my person when it became clear that romance was quite central to the story, but don't make that mistake: karou is a real character, not a vampire's girlfriend like twilight's bella or even a cool fighter and eventually-catatonic wife like katniss in the hunger games. if i have the willpower to wait a few weeks before going back to the library, i'll be reading the last third of her story on the beach in california, and probably crying my face off.

*it's also terribly exciting, if we're being honest, that i managed to cram clothes and shoes and plastic animals enough for an international press trip into a big weekender. imelda marcos i ain't, but joe's the packing talent at our place, and asking for his help before flying off without him would have been kind of shitty.

**i did not cry my face off when i read green's the fault in our stars, though i did like it and did almost cry a little bit when i saw a skinny foreign tourist girl on the subway with an "okay? okay." shirt a couple of weeks ago.

***neil gaiman: "kelly link is probably the best short story writer currently out there, in any genre or none. she puts one word after another and makes real magic with them—funny, moving, tender, brave and dangerous. she is unique, and should be declared a national treasure, and possibly surrounded at all times by a cordon of armed marines."

07.15.14

John H., Queens: We have had glitter parties that were something to behold. Our loft has uneven floorboards, and at night the lines between the boards are a vista of glitter highlights. In our loft it blows into glitter drifts and glitter dunes.

[...}

Amy L., San Francisco: We made a batch of fifty-two glitter valentines for my daughter to send on Valentine's Day, and later I felt so guilty thinking of all that glitter all over everybody's house in San Francisco. My husband Mike is a really, really orderly guy, and as he was Dustbusting it from between the cracks in the floor he looked up at me and said, "Never, ever do this again."

[...]

There's a piece of glitter on the carpet between my feet. From here, as I move my head, it flashes like a mirror signal from a distant ridge. Now I lie on the floor and look at it close up, through a photographer's loupe. The carpet strands are a glossy thicket, with the piece of glitter among the branches in the understory. Magnified, it is a coppery gold of uneven sheen.

[...]

Just now, my sister-in-law brought over her new baby daughter. I had never seen the baby before, and the baby had never seen New York. Her wide, dark eyes did not seem to blink as she moved them with a series of short adjustments from one new apparition to the next. She is a first child, cared for with the precision parents often give to their first. I looked her over carefully but could find no glitter at all. Before long, a piece will adhere to her, marking her as our own.

(ian frazier, from "all that glitter," 1995)

in other news, instagram frames on embedded photos are really terrible. get it together, instagram.

06.16.14

101 in 1001 {III}: 070 make beer [ongoing]

my night of triumph was at hand: after saving up and sanitizing eight empty swing-top grolsch bottles (arduous; grolsch is not very good), acquiring a brooklyn brew shop kit with ingredients for a gallon of their warrior double ipa, mashing in, collecting and boiling wort, adding hops, pitching yeast, watching the beer-beast freak out on our counter for three days, installing an airlock, some other steps i'm probably forgetting, and letting the growler of whatever it was at that point become self-aware in a dark corner of our bedroom closet for two weeks, it was time to siphon and carbonate and bottle and promote my homemade beer, which would be the finest beer in all the land. i would call it grand street brown-brown, perhaps, in honor of matty, who supervised and inspired my efforts à la brooklyn brewery's beloved monster. i sanitized and prepared my racking cane and tubing, realized i hadn't yet prepared the honey and water mixture in the bottom of my sanitized pot, spilled a bunch of honey on the cat (who had started drinking the sanitizer when my back was turned, then panicked and scattered my bottles when i caught him at it), fled to retrieve the growler from the bedroom closet, and found that a pile of laundry had snapped the airlock clean off at the growler's open mouth, which explains why our clothes have smelled so spooky this week. a hop-addled moth traced a crooked spiral out of the closet.

05.15.14

To Time, [John Updike] owned up to a "sneaking fondness for elegance, for people whose apartments are full of money and the martini comes all dewy and chilled." And then he launched into this remarkable riff:

There's a certain moment of jubilant mortality that you get on a Manhattan street—you know, all these people in the sunshine, all these nifty girls with their knees showing, these cops, these dope addicts, everybody swinging along, and they're never going to be in the same pattern again and tomorrow a few of them will be dead and eventually we'll all be dead. But there's a wonderful gay defiance that you feel in New York in the daytime.

(adam begley, from updike)

i think my lunch-hour wite-out project (above, an homage to angela deane's ghost photographs) is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to my office supplies.

01.30.14

in recent news of things i've set on fire, i can report that erin's* instant citrus votive project works and is amazing; i can now work my way through the huge bottle of canola oil i once bought to make a red velvet cake or something, and i have an ongoing excuse to buy handfuls of the satsumas and mandarins everyone else ignores in the office cafeteria. my one addendum to her instructions would be the observation that i probably should have extinguished the flame when the oil first ran out and the wick started to sizzle; instead i let the peel catch on fire (o pungent conclusion!). a capital trick, this.

*not to be confused with erin of the marvelous wildlife rehabilitation. quite nice to have multiple helpful erins about, i must say.

10.16.13

From: 1
To: 2, 3
ok, today's brainstorm need: making a "drowning pool" ophelia-type candy vortex in a glass jar out of blue sour straws for our goth party. what kind of figurine or image do i put at the bottom of the vortex?

From: 2
To: 1, 3
The grieving lady face from Edward Gorey? Phyllis Schlafly? Martha Stewart?

From: 3
To: 1, 2
John Boehner?

12.23.12

season's greetings, all; i hope your toes are precisely as warm as you would like them to be.

12.19.12

someday i'll write a terrifically long poem about manhattan christmas tree "lots." i know already that it will be terrible, but it will vibrate with feeling.

the cat has been arranging himself beneath our tree (which is still but half-adorned, for the weather hasn't been conducive to drying things out on the porch). "i am nearly finished," i tell him. "pracky," he replies, eyeing my little ceramic cherubs' tinfoil hats.

08.09.12

it was our excellent friend judd's birthday last weekend. he loves prince almost as much as i love candy, so i made him an artist-formerly-known-as piñata (on his 35th birthday, you see, prince announced that he was O(-+> henceforth); i filled it with peanut butter candy, purple-wrapped kisses, and tiny purple glow sticks, as one does.













i won't deny that tactical errors were made: i taped up the piñata's recycled-cardboard endoskeleton with such gusto, for example, that (like keith richards or blitzhund the deathless) it could not be killed by conventional means. judd owns a hacksaw, so i figure he can access his peanut butter and glow sticks if his need for them grows keen. truth be told, i never really thought the piñata would meet its end at the party; maintaining possession of one's bat is a key tenet of bartending, no? i also neglected to source fringed crepe paper or fringe scissors, so i burned a few hours listening to the olympics (grunty!) and making it the old-fashioned way. i also also neglected to consider the possibility of steve developing a crepe fetish. readers, i overcame all of those piñata tribulations; fuck yeah, time-intensive homemade presents.

07.13.12ii

conversations at the art supply store {II}

LMO: could you help me with some spray paint?
guy: sure! what color do you need?
LMO: black.
guy: that's easy!
guy: so...i got beat up last night.
LMO: god, i'm sorry!
guy: thanks.
LMO: what happened?
guy: this guy freaked out because some other guy drank his soda.
LMO: that's terrible. are you okay?
guy: yeah, i just got hit a couple of times here. [gestures at ribs] i'm pretty sore, though.
LMO: maybe you should get yourself checked out, to make sure your internal organs are okay.
guy: man, internal organs! well, it happened last night, so -
LMO: if you're still hurting in a couple of days, you should go see somebody. is this the black paint?
guy: no, it should be next to the white. here it is!
LMO: seriously, you don't mess around with that stuff.
LMO: and probably you shouldn't hang out with that guy any more.
guy: i'm the type of person that, when i see injustice, i have to speak up about it.
guy: and i think people appreciate that.

06.03.12

craft cabin interlude! though most of this year's celebrated whitney biennial left me a bit cold, i really loved the work by berkeley-based conceptual artist lutz bacher, who took 84 illustrations from a vintage astronomy book, mounted each in a little blond wood frame, and placed them throughout the whitney (it felt a bit like a stray cat* was following us through the biennial, appearing in and disappearing from our peripheral vision). i was reminded that i'd been meaning to pick up some old astronomy photos, so i did: ebay hooked me up with a boy scouts of america astronomy merit badge handbook (published in 1965) full of spiral galaxies, naughty-looking nebulae, and little cartoon troop leaders calculating the distance between planets. i decided i wanted to display them in one of those big collage frames everyone had in their upstairs hallways in the eighties; ebay came through for me there as well (i think the frame i bought and repainted had actually been in someone's attic since the eighties). i liked the idea of "family" photos, so i tried to present each comet and gas cloud as if it were a proud grad, or a child with a parent halfway out of the frame, or an uncle in front of a christmas tree. that probably isn't especially apparent in the finished project, but when i squint i see the moon in an argyle sweater vest, and i'm immensely pleased.

*joe called me as i left the office on friday: "there's a friendly little black cat in the yard! what do i do?" the little cat was still there when i got home forty-five minutes later, and it was indeed friendly; it was also pretty clearly a stray, as you could feel its ribs and vertebrae** and it didn't make a move to come inside when we held our building's back door open. several neighbors said they'd seen it before; we brought it food but decided not to bring it in, thinking it maybe didn't want to come inside, and now we feel terrible. what would you have done? (i ask because i'm hoping we'll see it again.)

**it wasn't starving, mind you - it was just alley-cat skinny. qualifying that makes me feel like a monster; come back, little cat!

10.10.11

101 in 1001 {II}: 061 make a terrarium [completed 10.01.11]



my apologies for the grimy photo; this is how lifestyle photography which follows one's morning run and precedes one's morning coffee goes down. terrarium-crafting, i have discovered, is extremely challenging; chopstick-assisted plant- and robot-sentry-placement is fine, but layering gravel and charcoal and dirt without approximating disco-era dry-lentil-and-pasta-sculpture is no mean feat. i found the borosilicate canister online, the little succulents under a tent at the union square greenmarket, and the blue fellow in a packet of robots and chocolate and licorice from amanda, who is good to me.

09.23.11



craft cabin update: a year after his gallery debut, the david bowie i sketched and embroidered is finally part of the granny cluster in our living room. i should take up my sewing again, it being the first day of fall (in weather like this, i could drink cider and pick out embroidery floss all day) and all. it's intensely satisfying to festoon the apartment with things one's made.

speaking of taking things up, i've been thinking of hosting a book chat this fall; i'm fond of and will keep going with THUNDERTOME, but it's so lovely to discuss books when one's company is, you know, on the same page. might you be interested in reading lev grossman's the magicians and meeting back here to break it down? i hadn't even heard of it until reviews of its sequel, the magician king, started popping up at the end of august; it sounds promising, though. from "the badly behaved wizards of lev grossman's the magicians," a q&a with the village voice:

VV: Reviewers have described The Magicians as an amalgamation of other books. It's Jay McInerney meets J.K. Rowling, or it's Less Than Zero plus Harry Potter. What's your own amalgamation description?

LG: You can't really leave out Rowling or C.S. Lewis, but the other main presences are Evelyn Waugh, particularly Brideshead Revisted, and Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Waugh takes young characters out of their sort of adolescent idyll and projects them into a very harsh and disorderly world—and just watches them flounder and sink. As they look for, you know, meaning and happiness and other things. God, I guess. And that's the structure of The Magicians, pretty much wholesale.

[...]

LG: I love Harry Potter, and it's a great fear of mine that The Magicians will be seen as a criticism or even an attack on Rowling. But I wanted to . . . test him. To test Harry. Or a Harry-like figure. To see what would happen if he was, say, having sex instead of snogging, or drinking real beer instead of butterbeer, if . . . his friends didn't have a Voldemort in their universe to tell them who's good and who's evil, to give them something to fight against.

VV: And what happens?

LG: Well, the story becomes less about fighting evil, using magic to fight evil, and more about trying to figure out . . . what the fuck magic is for.

could be interesting, no? i'm thinking we could plan to have the magicians under our belts (as it were) by halloween, which is both easy to remember and several weeks away; we could then meet back here around the first of november and talk wizards. and, like, waugh. what do you think?