So if you are out and about on Saturday night, October 10, or can be prompted to get out and about, would it not be so lovely to go see Chris Blair’s new work at Gallery Elusie?

The reception is Saturday night, October 10, from 5-8 and there will be food and wine and art and such, and is part of the Easthampton Arts Walk. Gallery Elusie is located at Old Town Hall at 43 Main St., Easthampton, MA.

The exhibit runs from Oct.10 – Nov. 14, 2009

Chris is a very nice guy and talented artist. His work can also be seen on my walls, at my new apartment.  ;-)

An old story, this, which I just found in my drafts folder;  the story of a housesitting adventure from July, gone awry, which I meant to post after I had a chance to tell the owner of the house as I figured she should be the first to hear it. And it’s much funnier as a verbal tale, but gosh, aren’t we all so busy? So this is how she will find out, rather than over drinks. ;-) And so it is written in present tense because I don’t have the energy, in the midst of my second move in one month (yet another drama), to change all the tenses. This is a tale of two locks. The tale of the two moves is for another day.

I am housesitting for a friend, a relatively benign thing, and yet things can so quickly change from the benign to the traumatic, to the hilarious, in the click of a lock.

I have housesat here before. I housesit a lot. I am in demand and it is high season. I am in demand because I don’t snoop, a common complaint about housesitters, so I am told. I must be told this because I’d otherwise not know it. I don’t need housesitters myself, as I have no house. And no longer have a pet.

I am super-obsessive about keys (and most things) when I am housesitting (and even when I am not) and if I go out for even a minute, I bring my keys. If I go out on the deck for even a piece of a minute, I unlock the door AND I bring my keys. But this morning was different somehow. Maybe I was not me this morning. Maybe my OCD let up for a minute. There are too many maybes to even ponder.

So, on this morning I let Girlie Girl (not her real cat name), the 18 year old cat who I am watching, out on the second floor deck for a minute and she immediately threw up all over it.  So I ran in and got water and soap and paper towels in order to clean it up, and a sudden gust of wind blew the door shut and locked behind me.I was stunned and unrealistically kept turning the knob, as though it would turn out to be somehow not true that I was on the wrong side of the door and that it was actually locked. But nothing changed.

This is not such a great ‘hood to be out in while wearing a skimpy and tattered t-shirt with no products from Victoria’s Secret or any other such purveyor of such things underneath, but then what ‘hood is? But this ‘hood does have some interesting characters running about in all manner of dress and with all manner of urgencies, running about at all hours, so perhaps it was the best ‘hood for such a spectacle.

Thankfully I had taken off the tattered shorts and thrown on a pair of jeans before that lock and that wind conspired to create this drama for me, but I had no shoes or sunglasses or keys or cell phone.

So I thought to run barefoot to my studio 6 blocks away where at the least  I have a spare car key and people to help me, and so I ran (ish), in my wobbly, disjointed manner, due to all those herniated disks and bone spurs and ever-spasming muscles, with eyes squinting against the very bright sun, arms crossed to cover the tatters and lack of said purveyed underthings, and as I ran, I realized that I much resembled a sort of not-so-uncommon local person of a certain type, and who might be perhaps experiencing some sort of drama due to some sort of deal, perhaps gone bad, or in desperate anticipation of some sort of deal which would very shortly go very well, if you know what I mean. I had been woken up at midnight-thirty the night before by someone yelling, “Hey! HEY! I don’t care what you do in your own home but I am NOT going to watch you beat up on a woman.” I had then looked out the window to see a bunch of of guys in a car below, passing some sort of illuminated thing, while the driver stood outside and beside his car yelling, and had heard one of the guys inside the car say, “She probably tried to rip him or or sell him some bad shit.”

When I got to my studio, with wild, unbrushed hair and unbrushed teeth, I had no key and so I banged on a window with a stray brick till the building manager let me in, and into my studio, for my spare car key. That was a start. Yet everything in my studio is in garbage bags for the ongoing and massive extermination (another traumatic story) but I dug around and found a tank top with built in sports bra, and the only shoes I could find; a pair of high heeled clogs. All in all a lovely ensemble, yet definitely some sort of upgrade. And it’s not like I care much about my appearance but I do generally cover myself and make attempts at cleanliness. I was somewhat horrified to be out and about in this condition.

The only person around at the building with a truck was presently underneath it in the parking lot gluing his muffler back in, so I ran next door to where my new stepfather works (husband of the biological mother I just met in the last year or so) and borrowed his mini van so we could load a 20 foot ladder and go climb in the one second floor window which I had just shut that morning, but not yet locked, thankfully.

So we – me and the building manager and his son – set the ladder against the wall. Yet the ladder stopped 4 feet shy of the window and we were all afraid of it and we were just standing there, staring at it for a moment, waiting for it to grow, and  just then, out of my peripheral vision, I saw a local sort of guy come along and next thing we know, he is climbing up our ladder and saying over his shoulder, “I am really good at this”.

We could not even stop him, though I think we were paralyzed also by fear of climbing that ladder ourselves. I then yelled toward him, “Don’t worry, I called the police to tell them we’d be going in through the window (because I had)”, and went on to say, “The owner’s boyfriend is a cop so I thought I’d better tell them as they tend to watch this place”, which of course is a spur-of-the-moment ‘hood-tailored lie.

Just as he got to the window he hesitated and turned and asked, “Is there a dog?” to which I immediately replied, “No, the dog won’t be back for another hour, with its owner, thank god, because I am terrified of it”, another construction of the moment.

So in he went. I climbed over the brick wall to the yard and went up the stairs where he let me in through that naughty door. I gave the guy $10, the only paper money I had in my pocket, and profusely thanked him. He seemed grateful for the money, but then said, “Imagine how much it would have cost if you had to call a locksmith?”, to which I replied, “Well, my friend Cal (no idea where I got that name) is a locksmith but he is in Northampton and could not get here for over an hour so I didn’t want to wait, as I have to get packed up and out of here before the owner gets back in an hour.”

He smiled and asked for a glass of water and as I gave it to him I must admit to my first thought being, “now I have his DNA!”, as I have been watching too much Law and Order lately. You know how they have those marathons? One of the best parts of housesitting is having tv, as I just have a digital converter box and it somehow got stuck on Fox, so I only have that one channel.

That glass sat on the counter for the next 3 days, with a little label that said, “Ladder-Climber”, which was not the maybe real name he had given me, which I’ll not use here.

So, he left and I put on a more fitting ensemble, got my keys, and drove the minivan back to its owner (neither of the men helping me had a driver’s license), walked back to the house, and got my car, and all was well.

“Stubborn realities”, how apt the phrase.

Last week I re-read Tracy Kidder’s Hometown, because I had not read it in years and it was lying about at one of my temporary house-sitting homes. This particular section struck me and I’d certainly not remembered it from my first reading and so I thought I’d share;

Reprinted here with no thought whatsoever toward obtaining permission.

“Thirty thousand souls. Plato’s ideal city state was about that size, Northampton’s size. To relieve the squalor and congestion of Renaissance Milan, Leonardo da Vinci devised a scheme for building ten new cities. Like Northampton, each was to have a population of thirty thousand. And thirty thousand was roughly the size of the famous “garden cities” drawn up by Ebenezer Howard at the end of the nineteenth century. Howard intended his ideal towns to serve as antidotes to the overcrowding of great cities such as London, and to the growing impoverishment of the English countryside. And his utopias were most unusual in that a few approximations actually got built.

Howard’s perfect garden city was neither quite a city nor a country town. It combined the best of both.  It wasn’t an American-style suburb, but a truly self-sufficient place, with farms and rural scenery, urban entertainment and variety. Northampton had become a place rather like that, where many people went weeks without leaving because they found some of everything they needed and wanted here. But Howard’s garden city depended on a collevtivist vision. The garden city itself would be the only landlord. And, Howard figured, his new city wouldn’t need more than a few cops, because, like Northampton, they would comtain only thirty thousand people, “who, for the most part, would be of the law-abiding class.” Utopias by definition ignore some stubborn realities. If a place is big enough to provide all the variety that the law-abiding want, it’s likely to be big enough to harbor most varieties of human nature unrestrained.”

And so you see, my dear Nyal, that great writers do begin sentences with “And”, making it perfectly acceptable for untrained hacks like myself to do the same.

I typically don’t like to ever begin a blog post with the old, “Gosh, I haven’t written in so long…”, so I’ll not do so. Nope.

But it has been a while, hasn’t it? Life has been medical appointments every week and sometimes up to one or more per day, for days on end. I am now seeing my old neurosurgeon in Boston from the days of the beginning of this ordeal, back in 1995. That’s a haul. I need a vacation from appointments, and from my crumbling spine. Oh, and from general insanity all around. I keep hearing, “Gosh, the whole world is stressed out and crazy!”. Yep. More fodder for the eventual book and too exciting to possibly get away with posting here, except perhaps in the form of “installments from a ‘friend’s’ upcoming novel”. ;-)

Lately I have been transient as it is high season for house sitting and pet sitting. I have had one gig after another and it is rather enjoyable to be away from my regular place and to have new pets every week. Like the kittens I am caring for now. Gosh. That’s all I can say.

I am also looking to move as winter is coming and after last winters’ heating debacle – 16 days with no heat, and 5 of them with no electric, meaning we could not even run space heaters and had to work elsewhere – I don’t much expect more of the same. It occurs to me that someone should buy a building and build reasonable live/work spaces – truly reasonable and not at the fancy prices that are out there now – one would have a full building in months with a waiting list pages long. Time to win the lottery. Yet I have no desire to be a landlord. Is it landlordism that makes people crazy? Or do crazy people become landlords? Chickens and eggs, that is the parallel question.

In the meantime are kittens and cats and gosh, it is such sweet sorrow parting from each place. It seems good housesitters are hard to find, so they say, and I hear many stories of snoopers and the like. And so I am in demand. Everyone should have a talent. :-)

This has been a boring post, by way of getting back in the habit. Soon I will update about the stray cat and the ensuing drama. I am just getting my feet wet again here and getting back in the habit. Meanwhile I bring you todays’ kittens, as shot by my cell phone.

And throwing it out there that I am looking for new space. I have never been late on my rent here, in the past 3 plus years, and my habits and hobbies are of the quiet sort. Gone are the days of parties and loud music while I work. I wonder if I am growing up.

Thanks to everyone who has been nudging me. I promise to get back in the habit. You all are so sweet.

According to an article at Total Recall Info, Benigngirl has been ordered for removal by the authorities

RECALL INFORMATION
June 5—Benign Girl recalls more Toy TELEPHONE SETS—Greece

Manufacturer: See Below
Product: Kids Toys

Start Date: 2009-06-05  End Date: 2009-07-05

Product: Toy telephones – Super telephone

Brand: Benign girl

Type/number of model: Code No. 143-333

Description: A toy telephone set, comprised of a pink and white flip-top mobile telephone and a pink and white cordless telephone. The toy is operated by 3 button batteries of 1.5 V. The set is packed in a blister on cardboard bearing a picture of two dolls (girls), the CE mark and warnings.

Country of origin: China

Damage to hearing

The product poses a risk of damage to hearing because the weighted emission of acoustic pressure is 119.7 dB which exceeds the maximum permitted value of 80 dB.

The product does not comply with the Toys Directive and with the relevant European standard EN 71.

Withdrawal from the market ordered by the authorities.

Paper City Studios Announces Spring Open Studios and Installation Event! May 8, 9 and 10, 2009.

Paper City Studios’ “Pulp Science Fiction” spring event offers open studios with resident artists working in painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, multimedia, performance and fashion design. Guest artists featured in our 5,000 square foot special exhibition space present gas masks for elephants, video by alien invaders and close encounters with spaghetti and marshmallows. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, May 8, 9 and 10 at 80 Race Street in the Holyoke canal district. Admission is free. Information at www.papercitystudios.wordpress.com

Pulp Science Fiction Poster

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

Place: PAPER CITY STUDIOS
(MapQuest – 80 Race St, Holyoke, MA, 01040)

Dates and Times:

Fri, May 8 Opening night reception, open studios and installation exhibit – 6 to 9 p.m.

Sat, May 9 Open studios and installation exhibit – 12noon to 9p.m.

Sun, May 10 Open studios and installation exhibit – 12noon to 5p.m.

ARTISTS SHOWING AT PAPER CITY STUDIOS

Bernard Banville, sculpture/installation

Michal Barrett, sound

Neil Broome, collage, painting

Christopher Blair, video

Torsten Zenas Burns, installation , video projection

Karen Dolmanisth, sculpture/installation

Bruce Fowler, sculpture, video installation

Unique Fredrique, unknown artistic direction

Kari Gatzke, installation

Gary Hallgren, sculpture

Amy Johnquest, installation

Charles Jones, sculpture

Ruth Kristoff, sculpture/installation

George May, photography

Rebecca Migdal, multimedia

Mia Nacamulli, installation

Chris Nelson, sculpture/installation

Dean Nimmer, painting, drawing

Twyla Reardon, installation

Mo Ringey, sculpture

Kim Rosner, clothing design

Nancy Sachs, sculpture

Dan Warner, installation/video/sound

Christopher Willingham, painter /installation

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:

Bruce Fowler, brucefowlerart[at]yahoo.com

Dean Nimmer, deannimmer[at]gmail.com

Paper City Blog

Parsons Hall Project Space

My guest will be Jess Dugan and we’ll be chatting about An evening of TRANS Art and Activism. Listen live if you are in the Pioneer Valley area at WXOJ-LP, 103.3 FM from 8-9 AM or, stream it live at www.valleyfreeradio.org

The podcast will be posted later in the day at my podcast page.

Dear Mo-ie Dearest, I am just short of cutting off my ear for love, signed, ~>

“]

Wine Glass with reservoir: Two of these together might make a heart shape - making this image relevant to this post - and might help rekindle the love. [SOURCE

Hell, make a garland and wear it around your neck like a giant neck corsage. Better yet, make the whole pile into a garland and then immortalize it in a colorful jello mold and sell it to MOMA for a million dollars, become instantly rich and famous and take a year off to travel the world staying in villas, chateaus and yurts, and rekindle the love.

Yes, that is the best plan my friend. Start weaving; figuratively and literally. I have all the best ideas. ;-)

Your pal, Mo-ie Dearest

Better yet, if I were at a puppet show I would be the child on the right, over the word “mundo”. That’s how I most often feel inside.

I should have gotten him a buck-toothed Deer cake to celebrate a week since surgery.

SAY IT WITH CAKE

CAKEY MESSAGES BROUGHT TO YOU BY CakeWrecks

Today was a week since Chauncey the Cat’s surgery so it was time to let him go. Somehow he seemed to know this as he was restless. I got to my studio at 10 AM today and pulled back the blankets and he blinked at me all sleepy-eyed and hunkered back down in his bedbox. So I made him a plate of Fancy Feast with a side of dry and slipped it into his cage.

Or maybe a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow parting gift cake

About 30 minutes later he started crying and I saw that he had accidentally pushed his plate out of the cage, out of reach. So I went over to fix this and he started hissing at me. He doesn’t often hiss at me.

Instead of a goodbye note he left me this cake which he must have made in his Kenner Easy Bake Oven

After fixing the plate I went back to work at my computer and heard him crying and this started a pattern of crying till I came to his cage and hissing when I got near. So I did it; I opened the door and also opened the door to the hallway and went back to work. I never heard a sound, but 5 minutes later I peeked over and the cage was empty. Dude was gone.

So I made this cake for him and left it in the hallway, near his new home. It has liver frosting.

I didn’t see him for the rest of the day but just now I walked out to the back hallway and there he was; sitting in his usual hallway spot staring at me. And crying. As usual – as had been our ritual for the past few months – I sat on the floor a few feet away and talked to him and he stopped crying and settled down.When I went back in my studio I saw him peek around the corner to look into the door that I left open for him. I am buoyed by that.

That’s it. We are back to where we were, more or less. I am glad that he is not mad at me I am glad that he seems to miss me.

I thought this was a dog cake but it turns out that it is a ewe cake.

Oh, and before I let him go, we added sheetrock walls to his special new home so that when the landlord’s dogs are here, they can’t annoy him, even when he is in his indoor patio. I even taped a picture me on his wall inside his new catitat.