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November 29, 2004

toasty!

Ok, here's the thing of it- I have a new hobby,

taking pictures of my reflection in the toaster.

Posted by pippypippy at 01:34 PM | Comments (5)

November 28, 2004

gone

It is with great sadness that we received the news of the passing of Chicago painter Ed Paschke. Paschke, 65, had been the most famous of the Chicago Imagist school and, in recent years, the most influential Chicago painter. His monumental, visionary, and sometimes inscrutable style had made him an international art celebrity. Among the Chicago artists who knew him, he is remembered as a friendly and generous character, who was always willing to use his influence to help other artists succeed.
Personally, I was lucky enough to have made his acquaintance, briefly, on several occasions, at art openings and around town. Paschke was also something of a family friend, having been a student at The School of the Art Institute at the same time as my mother was, and later her teacher at Barat College. Recently, they maintained a casual friendship as he was a frequent customer at Goods, and often gave encouragement and advice to my mom regarding her artwork. I believe at one time his words to her were, "You need to get cranking." (Words to live by!) As a favor for my Mom, Ed was kind enough to lend his name to a letter of recommendation for me for graduate school at SVA. At the time, I was so intimidated that I couldn't bring myself to compose a proper thank-you note to him, although I was aware of his reputation for having a humble demeanor in spite of his fame. So I will say it now, out into the aether, thank you Ed, wherever you are, from a fellow lover of chickens. You will be missed.

Posted by pippypippy at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2004

ahem!

Ok! We now return to our regularly scheduled Knit-A-Log, already in progress!
Where to begin?
The day after Thanksgiving, the extra frenzied gift knitting season officially kicked off and the needles were, and will continue to be, until at least Christmas Eve, I suspect, hot, hot!! Some projects are so super secret that they can't even be mentioned! There is an electricity in the air! In addition, this Sunday will be the First Annual Holiday Knit-A-Thon at our house. Scarves will be made! Treats will be eaten! And a good time will be had by all. Be there!
In other news, on Thanksgiving, the first Forslin relatives extended family get-together outside of a funeral home went off swimmingly! As we sat down to dinner, beautiful 5 year-old Grace said grace and gave everyone pause in her inimitable, disarming, and uniquely cheerful way. It was the first time many of us had met my 1st cousin twice removed, and she made quite an impression! Grace is a delicate and angelic creature, who dances, smiles, and sings. Quite the unearthly beauty! She doesn't walk because she hovers!
Ugh, there is so much more to say but no time to say it!
It snowed and has finally gotten cold enough to wear the orange hand-warmers, which, I am pleased
to say, function very nicely in keeping the wind out of one's sleevies (Q: where does Napoleon keep his armies? A: In his sleevies!!)
That's the Knit-A-Log for now!

Posted by pippypippy at 09:17 AM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2004

I really am very unhappy

Okay, here's the thing about what I posted yesterday.
It generated quite a bit of discussion.
First of all, I never meant to offend or imply that I am not duly miserable.
And I didn't mean to imply that any homeless people should be joyous about being homeless. What I got from the quote was that the homeless are there because they are allowed to be there on purpose, and serve a convenient and unacknowledged reinforcing function. Call it a conspiracy theory.
Plus, I, as a marginally employed person, at times consider that I could find myself in that very same not very joyous position.
I would be pleased to knit scarves and hand them out to any and all homeless people, and have on occasion been known to hand them change, if that makes anybody feel any better.
Truly, one of these days I intend to justify my existence.
Until I increase my productivity I promise to limit my intake of happiness so as not to be a burden on the system.
But I can only speak for myself! Marcel, on the other hand, I'm sure will continue in his joyful ways as an utterly unrepentant useless eater..

Posted by pippypippy at 07:30 AM | Comments (4)

November 17, 2004

I knew it!

Here is something I came across online this morning that made me happy~
"Under capitalism, failure to compete is punished by the severest measures: for if people are to keep on capitulating, non-participation must look utterly undesirable, must be associated with the worst dregs of society and the most unendurable tribulations. The homeless and chronically unemployed (or underemployed like me! Which is even worse because we are chumps who are hoping one day to be fully employed on the wage slave treadmill but can't seem to achieve it -Pippy!) play as fundamental a role in our economy as bosses and bureaucrats do: they teach us to equate life off the treadmill with alcoholism and mental illness, (and chronic aimless knitting) they are visual cues reminding us that annihilation is the only alternative to wage slavery. But this intimidation tactic can only succeed so long as the unemployed cooperate by accepting their misery, and the miserable cooperate by accepting employment. As soon as a new class of self-proclaimed failures appears, visibly finding happiness by rejecting both options and making a joyous catastrophe (and lots of scarves and mittens and Floofs!) of their lives, the jig will be up."
Yeah.
You can read more about the revolutionary potential and power of failure and disaster in Harbinger #5, here! Or clickety-click on the crimethinc link! The crimethinc website is always a good source of inspiration when one is feeling a little lonesome or down in the dumps. Not that I am, I am feeling rather chipper in spite of myself and my life circumstances. The weather is somewhat gloomy - and unseasonably warm, Marcel and I knew that as soon as he got a new sweater this would happen - and the light is soft and easy on the eyes. Its much less pressure this way, as no beautiful day will go to waste if one chooses to stay indoors, drink tea, ruminate, and indulge in sheer unbridled floof knitting.

Posted by pippypippy at 08:36 AM | Comments (1)

November 14, 2004

a handsome devil

Hey ladies...!

Marcel knows the ladies can't resist sensitive guys in sweaters. That's why he owns several.
Here he is modeling his latest, a little acrylic fair isle number from Fido's on Clark Street in Andersonville, where one can find haute couture as well as haute canine cuisine. They have cheesecake, for very, very good dogs, and bad dogs if they promise to be good, which comes in cheddar and peanut butter for the discriminating palate. And not too pricey! Highly recommended!

Here are a few more photos from Savannah~
this was on a very pretty little building. A lot of the houses and buildings have very elaborate columns with floofy leaves like these.

This fern was in front of a building where I wanted to live on Oglethorpe Street, across from the very old cemetary.

And this is the inside of the Gryphon Tea Room, where Thomas and I ate lunch on our last day in Savannah. It is owned by SCAD, and staffed by friendly art students. It was super nice and pretty, this photo hardly does it justice. Plus the food is yummy! They had lots of cake there but I didn't try any (see lower right hand corner of photo for cake) even though I wanted to. Once in awhile one must at least pretend to have self control, for gosh sakes. Anyway.

Here are a couple more cemetary shots.

I really liked the leaves on the corner of this stone.
And the skully on this one is very serious!!

And finally, so as not to bring anyone down too much~ always remember that in the whole entire universe everything comes back to one central vortex.

And there's always room for

Posted by pippypippy at 01:15 PM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2004

in memory of Teleman Cuyler

Here are just a few of the photos I took in Savannah~

I think this is my favorite of the cemetary photos. This was in the not so old cemetary, which I believe was called St. Bonaventure but I could be wrong. It really is so lush and green there!

This is at the same cemetary.
The older cemetary had a lot of stones that looked like this~

And this~

And finally, here is the Floof in my favorite coffeehouse in town. You can't see too much of the coffeehouse, but it was very comfy and lots of students worked at it and hung around it, since it was within blocks of the school. There were some seriously goth paintings on the walls, some featuring bored, emaciated, beautiful naked people. I observed some small children reacting, they weren't quite sure what to make of it all. Their mom had parked them on a couch in front of a full length, narrow canvas depicting two sexy skeletal figures, male and female, side by side on a bed, wearing beautiful bored expressions generally found on models in glossy magazine advertising, the female completely nude, the male modestly sporting something of a pouchy (!) pair of tighty-whities. At first the two little girls didn't seem aware of the pictures on the wall. Once they were they looked slightly guilty, and began whispering and giggling. Then they caught me looking at them and looked even more guilty. The mom came out of the ladies' room to collect them, glanced at the wall and quickly herded them out, pretending she hadn't seen anything.
I didn't feel it was right to photograph someone else's paintings although it was tempting, if only to mock them later. Here is the Floof in the comfy chair~

Look for more Savannah and Floof photos to come!

Posted by pippypippy at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2004

scalp-crinkling!

Ok, since I am suffering from insidious writer's block, as there is so much news to report, so many pictures to post that there is nowhere to begin, here is a link, which, even if you are incredibly busy and overwhelmed with crucial and inescapable tasks you really must go to immediately for your own amusement and edification. If you don't believe me, here is a brief synopsis~ David Foster Wallace reviews a biography of Borges and he doesn't think its so good.

The long-anticipated trip to Savannah GA went well. The town is certainly beautiful, small and slow-paced, with beautiful old houses, some of them poetically boarded and rotting, and parks and squares dripping with Spanish Moss. We also saw cemetaries, one very old in which were buried yellow fever outbreak victims, influenza epidemic victims, a famous painter of miniature portraits, and at least one young man who died fighting a duel, the exact circumstances of which were and are unknown.The other cemetary we saw was not so old, but equally tragic and ghostly due to the lush vegetation and overarching canopies of branches dripping with moss. The streets have charming and in some cases funny names like Oglethorpe (the founder and planner of the town, after which lots of things in Savannah are named) Abercorn, Habersham, Bee, and Bull. The reputation for hauntedness in Savannah is not surprising given that the past hangs heavily on everything, and the humid air makes one loathe to hurry up and go anywhere or do anything but sit in one's bare feet on one's porch (or in our case in one of several coffeehouses in the town) and drink sweet (or, as they say, unsweet) tea.

Once one drives a few minutes outside of the historic district, speed picks up again, and time snaps you back into the great strip of Waffle Houses that is the 21st century Georgia highway. God Bless America and the Waffle House! We only ate there once (photos to come!) but we could have eaten at
a different one for every meal and not run out of fresh ones between downtown Savannah and the Motel 6 in the roughly 4 days we spent there. Once I had a friend from Texas who said that in the whole entire world everything comes back to Waffle House. Now I know what he meant.

As for the school, SCAD, it appears to be a lively community of hard-working, if a bit inarticulate, eager young art students. The school obviously has ample funding from somewhere (?) and owns a good portion of the town. There is a charming green three story house which serves as the illustration building, which is where I hope to spend a fair amount of time. It has light airy rooms with tall windows that face the trees and the neighborhood, and is quiet and somewhat sterile with narrow hallways and an old, tiny, ornate spiral staircase, now nonfunctional, which curls into an old, nonfunctional attic with a skylight. The library is housed in a former department store. The design is spacious and sleek but at the same time it is such a relaxing space, clean with low bookshelves, a wide, central stairway with frosted glass stairs (apparently at one time the stairs had been glass, and perfectly transparent but this design flaw was quickly corrected when young men were seen lurking on the lower levels, looking up at girls in their summer dresses) that my brother and I were compelled to spend three evenings there, reading and looking at the internet, enjoying the cool quiet and comfy leather chairs (and simultaneously avoiding a dreary evening at the Motel 6 in Richmond Hill~ not an entirely bad deal at 30-some dollars a night but pretty bare-bones, although the parking lot provided much entertainment in the form of camo-clad guys with hunting gear and big trucks, a woman with no front teeth who had a barky little wiener dog whom she told had "the biggest mouth in Georgia", and some interesting debris~ more about that later!). It was also pleasing and inspiring to see students drawing, apparently working on homework assignments, at the tables in the library as well as in the coffeehouses near the school. I saw this a couple of times, and it did my heart so much good seeing them with their pencils, earnestly bent over dog-eared sketchbooks! We were told, on a tour of the school, that there are Sequential Art (essentially comic book art) students who are rarely seen in the light of day, or at any other time, and when they are, they appear pale, permanently hunched, and grasping at sometimes invisible drawing utensils. The building where these students work is in a remote corner of town, and we didn't get out of the bus to look inside.
In another part of the tour we saw industrial design students at work in factory size sheds, fabricating their car and boat designs. We also saw the film and animation departments, and the most shiny new Macs I have ever seen in one place at one time in my whole life.

Sooo... in all I was quite impressed with the school, now it is a question of scraping together the piles and piles of the really large cash one is required to fork before gaining admission to this prestigious institution. Stay tuned for the boring details as they develop..

Posted by pippypippy at 09:53 AM | Comments (1)