All around town with Heloise

Completely different flowers this time. I haven't done any embroidery in a year or something, but was pleased to remember lazy daisies and french knots. When I was a kid, I was incapable of learning the french knot. Oh how far we have come.

At first I thought this installation at Windsor was yet more contrived hipster bullshit (and it is), but it is pretty amusing to read them as you wait for the bathroom. They're all from the 80s and prior.

I've been meaning to find a ridiculous old stereo at Goodwill or something so that I can listen to my tapes again. I could get rid of almost anything, but I have held steadfastly to my tape collection. Can't get rid of any of them. After I moved, I tried to take an assessment. Lots of weird shit in there, and seventeen Cure tapes.

Anita and Kaveh's melted bricks in Albuquerque.

This is where my dad lived when he was a small child. This is a poor shot taken at noon, not very good. Except for the fence and the landscaping, it's just as it was in the 50s, and so I've always had a half-assed idea to sneak in and get some decent shots, since we have early photos of the house after it went up.

This is probably the fanciest house they had in Phoenix. It's on Central & Bethany, about the third house south of Bethany. It's goddamned gigantic and my grandma hated it. She came from a farm and had simple tastes. It wasn't the unnecessary sprawl of the house, or the need for hired help to keep it clean due to four children under the age of six, but the swimming pool. She was convinced that there would be a drowning unless they moved. My grandfather wouldn't put a fence around it because he felt that pool fences looked like shit.

Bear lives nextdoor to my grandma. Anyone looking for a sweet tween-aged Rottweiler? Bear's owner is a piece of shit. The dog is always outside. When I first saw him, he was friendly and desperate for attention. The last time I was there, when these photos were taken, he cowered as I approached. At ME, who has met him, and was approaching slowly while talking to him in my dog-voice. Motherfucker.

The owners are rarely home and the yard, which they share with my grandmother, is protected by a short fence that doesn't lock, so, yanno. Just saying, Bear is available for easy re-homing. I would probably take him myself, but I currently live in a small apartment with no yard. Oh, and three pre-existing animals, none of whom will be at all hospitable to this oafy playful dog.

I spent my entire day reading this blog from the beginning. I haven't made it out of 2008 yet.

My American-Iraq Life

I go through a two-part cycle when it comes to how I accept information into my life. Sometimes I'm a voracious newshound, reading all the time, raging and fretting, bring it up when people just want to joke around, and judging and dismissing people who don't care about what I think is important. And if I'm really comfortable with someone or already dislike them, I will feel free to attack them about it.[1]

And other times I completely check out. Completely. I only hear about the most grievous of events as little chirps and hamfisted discussions catch my attention at work. I was in one of these blackouts last year when Haiti was devastated by the earthquake. I found out something like THREE DAYS LATER. My ability to ignore the world around me is strong.

When I inevitably cycle back into being on full alert about world events, I look back on what I was doing the prior week ("20 minute internet searches for pictures of Esmond Romilly? Really?" or exhaustive research about Queen Victoria's first daughter for no apparent reason other than I wondered if she was a bitch like her mother, and looked like her), then I start to feel guilty. I feel like I'm wasting my time, and like not paying attention to events is perpetuating the problems that created them, even if my only reaction to them would be to later get in a fight at work about it.

And that's about it! I see no end to this cycle. I have to assume that my blackout periods are regulated by my brain to keep me from going absolutely insane. Victimization of people by the government, big business, human rights violations, kidnap and murders of overseas journalists, dog fighting, strip mining, femicide still happening in Juarez, American vet soldiers killing themselves on the steps of VA hospitals! I take the distress of these things on completely. If I was flipping out about these things full time, I would die of stress-induced heart complications while still in my 20s.

Anyway, the above linked blog is very fascinating and certainly started a nice guilt spiral about being another do-nothing baby with nothing to bitch about but my various luxuries. Enjoy! No, really. Do read it, it's an interesting slice of life about her experience as an enlisted female in the army, serving in Iraq, and dealing with it later.

[1] Last week I watched the Pat Tillman documentary. I was in a state afterward, outraged at the implications, and plagued by descriptions of his veins making a sound "like a drinking fountain" as they expelled all of his blood once one of his platoon had shot his head off. Soon after, poor soul, my mother called me and began to talk about an interview she had watched recently with Paris Hilton and her stupid bitch mother. I lost it, screeching in all caps into the phone some shit about defiling oneself by the information we take in - I can be a real dick, but I don't give a fuck, 'cause I still think I'm right and haters gonna hate, after they watch the Hangover 2.

Now, please ignore the irony of the post beneath this one in which I cry about not being able to wear costumes 24/7.

Wish I was an Edwardian baebe

If only I could spend my time alternating between lying/flouncing around in lacy tea dresses, lawn dresses, and other drippy, cream colored garments, but being alive in the modern world is a dirty business, and it simply isn't practical. Me, crawling out of my car in a long skirt with a 24" circumference. Me, getting caught in doors by my sleeves, or waving the cat away as she tries to bat at them. Me, frantically dabbing coffee out of a 96 year old bodice - it's just not viable.

Unfortunate.

This fashion era, although admittedly awkward at times, is one of my very favorites, if not my main favorite. No other bygone period of fashion is as charming or flattering. Victorian wasp waists are a little disgusting, and bustles look grotesque. Remember the two nasty sisters from Disney's Cinderella? And the reality of so many layers and sleeves to your wrists is less romantic than is typically imagined. Have you ever tried on or seen a 19th century dress in person? Two words: sweat stains.

Another eminent fashion favorite is the 1920s in which everyone envisions some boyish model in a fringey dress. The reality? Shapeless dresses that double as potato sacks, drop waists, rolled stockings! Rolled stockings. Also, cloche hats look like shit on me.

Yeah, Edwardian fashion (the Romanovs, the Titanic, Julia Ormond in Legends of the Fall for those who don't view history as a chronology of dresses) is the best. Modernized but pretty and romantic. Less bullshit than prior periods, fewer skirts, no corset, enough lace to keep French maiden aunts busy for a century, and the jewelry is refined and classical - no jet or reliquaries and other heavy shit if you are not into that.

Oh and if you like to swim (I don't - auction's all yours): About as modest as you can get with your knees exposed.

more old tori footage.

i love this era of her, with her drug store red hair and wide open face. she's unrefined in the best way. the only thing that kind of sticks in my craw about these early performances are the really dramatic, theatrical head-tosses and playing to that whole wild wood nymph tied to piano thing. my tastes are too subtle to like all of that. but she was young and crazy so what the fuck ever.

pretty sure that i have made a very similar post to this in the past.

DEAL W/ IT

On Mariposa

Following my grandmother's somewhat unexpected death in 2003, my aunt renovated her house and moved in. As the executor of the estate, she was supposed to have sold the house and split the profit four ways between she and her stupid siblings, but she decided that it was not an option to let the house go. I felt the same way. My dad criticised this action and rudely dismissed her desire to keep the house as "a shrine to mom." Not so. She tore everything out of the house, the original kitchen, the ugly 70s tile, the dark carpet, the ancient drapes, and she remade it into something that more or less resembles the Apple store.

But the backyard remains. The old radio flyer wagon is still there, which in my grandma's day was used to transport large bags of cat food from the door to a storage room. The ancient ferns still sit by the alley wall, one 100 years old, the other about 50, brought here from Iowa by my great-grandmother. The guest house (we called it the maid's quarters) which was full of moldering artifacts of mingled family pasts. Warped encyclopedias, medical texts from the 70s, discarded motorcycle parts, and spiders. So many spiders. Also rolls of carpet covered in cat pee, full disclosure.

This is the narrow sideyard. When I was small, my cousins told me that a witch lived there. It was overgrown with bushes at that time and they told me that she hid behind the last one. Even last month when I walked back there to take a picture, my brain recalled the slightest waft of apprehension.

The outdoor fireplace, never once used by my grandmother since 1964. This was another dark area of the yard for me as my cousins told me that this fireplace had been used by a very old woman to burn the bodies of the children she had killed. In my mind, the fairytale was a strange mix of Hansel & Gretel, and the Holocaust. Somehow, I already knew about the Holocaust then.

It was kind of a bitch being the youngest cousin. During summertime sleepovers, my cousin Angie would shove me out of the twin bed we were sharing, telling me that the ground was covered in so many roaches that they would carry me away. To hell, assumedly, where they came from. I would cling desperately to her so that she couldn't shove me out of bed, determined that I would take her with me if I failed.

They would also put dried locust skins in my hair in the summer, but this just feels like complaining now. And when my grandmother would find out, perhaps because I had failed to get one out and had returned to the house with a dead bug skin tangled in my hair which was immediately spotted, she would get the flyswatter out and slap their arms and legs with it a couple of times each, squawking at them comically that they were bad! I never got swatted. Not with a flyswatter, or a broom (her other weapon, mostly against cats), and never was I spanked. I was the total ass-kiss grandchild who did everything she told me to and asked for stories about the farm, which were her favorite ones to tell and my favorite ones to hear.

The clip actually begins at 1:08, not that the introduction is tedious.

I watched F for Fake for the first time this weekend and was very captivated by this part. I replayed it several times. It stands alone without any difficulty, but leading into this clip is a portion of the film about how an alleged art forger claims to never have applied any false signatures to his works, now hanging in the most eminent museums in the world. Who signed them then? Does it matter?

Taxidermy I

A pretty nice Victorian-era taxidermied goldfinch. The finch looks like it's in great condition. I love finches! And all birds.

Trapdoor spiders! I was very concerned about trapdoor spiders as a kid but haven't thought of them since. I used to look for them in our yard, more with an air of prevention than anything. This is an amazing and terrifying listing. There is a preserved spider in one of the nests! Looking like some tucked-up cords of hairy evil in there. Actually, it looks like a fried soft-shell crab. Trapdoor spiders are so insidously ingenious, I still have a mental clip of footage of one lunging out of its little tube to apprehend some other creature. It plays in slo-mo in my mind; it is still scary.

An unfortunate little Italian Greyhound from A Case of Curiosities. This is a pretty excellent site of charming taxidermy pieces and fascinating repairs she's done to some really old ones.

Opinions

Amazon should allow you to sort search results by where they would be shipped from, for instance when sorting through hundreds of two-dollar listings for a remaindered Alain de Botton book (or whatever). Ebay does.

I should start keeping a list of these complaints. I have all kinds of consumerist problems like this, such as:

There should be more farmer's markets in Phoenix that are open all the time. There are five million people here, and though 4.9 million of those people buy their food at Walmart, I DON'T. I just need a place to buy TOMATOES.

Why did my Safeway stop carrying Vegenaise? I DON'T EAT EGGS.

Why doesn't Ebay email me when my watched items are about to end? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, and I can't be remembering all of the random old garbage I'm trying to buy without some help.

Why is there only one person per department manning the phones at ASU? I know it's summer but fuck those guys. All day long there is a message telling you to call back between 5:30 pm and 7:30 pm and I'm pretty sure that if they're on a skeleton summer crew, then they're NOT THERE AFTER FIVE. I am convinced that this is a joke and that they are dicks. At one point today after stalk calling them, I did get some hold music, but I had to give up when my phone was going to die after 45 minutes of incessant, soothing horn music. If I could leave a message after my interminable phone wait, I would have Stephen Fry do it for me:

And lastly, everyone at the airport is a dick, and hates you.

All of these complaints are only from yesterday and today. If I wrote everything down, I'd have more volumes than Proust.

Words -> Pictures

Poster & design masters POSTERTEXT have made this delightful wall art out of literary classics.

The background is composed of portions of or the entirety of the actual text.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Caroll

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

More at Postertext

Is this too twee?

Yes. It is. But it doesn't have to be.