The Mississippi, High Water

The girlettes wanted to go on a field trip downtown, to see the rushing waters of the Mississippi River.
"It's for school," they said. "It's historic."

I don't know that it's historic? (no), but with the snowmelt of a very snowy winter, the river waters are "above normal" and are near flood stage in the city.

The field trip destination was the pedestrian-only Stone Arch Bridge (used to be a railway bridge. Completed in 1883 it's the second oldest bridge on the river, and formerly the center of the milling industry that built the city).
The bridge overlooks St. Anthony Falls and the lock & dam there.

The water was raging! Its spray dotted my glasses.
You can hear its roar in my 11-second video:

Three dolls were with me, but I only let PennyCooper out of my backpack for fear they would fall in. (Or jump! I could hear them squeaking about Huck Finn... They wouldn't mind at all if they were swept up in the water, but I would.)

I ran into a dear friend, Jill, who'd also come to see the water. (There were lots of other people looking too.)
Jill and I held up our cameras to take selfies at the same time:

Jill is a tonic! She lives in a far suburb and I don't see her often, but I'm always lifted when I do.

We talked about aging, and it was cheering because we feel the same way: IT IS REAL.
Jill's only a few years older than 62-year-old me. We both said we feel the realities of aging in our bodies--death is not just an idea anymore.

She and her husband are looking into euthanasia options, should they need them.
"It's complicated," she said. Looking at the river, she said, "Might be easier just to jump in here..."
LOL, yes.
I said I could easily buy poison from the dealers across the street from the thrift store.

We've got to Be Prepared or lose our chance, right?
People say they want to kill themselves under x, y, z conditions, but then they get caught out (or change their minds--fair enough! Life wants to live).
But with dementia, say: if you don't leave in the early stages--should you want to--soon you lose your ability to choose.

(I totally don't think we should feel we have to kill ourselves if we get dementia, but the reality is, if you don't have good support (or even if you do), dementia can get grim... Who knows? It's an individual thing. Anyway, I want to think about and discuss with friends these things before they surprise me, which, really, could happen anytime now. Though I hope not.)

I walked back across a smaller bridge traversing a side channel, where the river goes around Nicollet Island. I had to look up its name--the Merriam Street Bridge, built in 1887.
(What I don't know about the City is a lot.)

They loved the orange buoys. The water is calmer here, but it's traveling very fast. You can see it pulling around the outer buoy.

Afterward I went to Starbucks by the river and had an oatmilk latte. I took a mirror selfie in their bathroom--I love these black with yellow-stripe buttons that I sewed onto my old jacket made by Bemidji Woolen Mills. (Another piece of Minnesota history--the mill started up north in 1920 and is still in the original family.)

Sonnet Distraction

And now, off to work. I'd been dreading Monday morning's staff meeting (we have these maybe quarterly),
but I came up with a great coping mechanism:
I worked on writing a sonnet during the meeting!

I could hear what Big Boss was saying, but the sonnet distracted me so he registered kinda like an adult in Charlie Brown cartoons (woaaah whwaaah).
Ha! I looked it up--the adult voices are made with a rubber plunger over a trombone's bell.

What was he saying? He was talking about negotiation among coworkers, and alongside some stuff he'd Xeroxed from a business site he put a couple quotes from the Bible--Paul instructing Timothy? maybe? on handling divisions in the church.
So, so weird.
Not all of us are Christian, but even if we were... Why run a retail business this way.
After five years of this nonsense that never goes anywhere, I am done with listening to him.

Pippi & Penny

 My friend R's cat Pippi was unusually interested in getting to know Penny Cooper.

Seventies Sunflowers & Apotropaic Doll

I. That Seventies Display

Yesterday Art, the volunteer who disdains kitsch, put this crewel-work sunflower panel in my area (below) : "I thought you'd like it".
I do!
He knows shoppers like this sort of stuff too, but he can't bring himself to dignify it with a decent price: he'd priced it $8.99.
OMG.
It has a tear and it's splattered, lower left, with ... coffee? I think you could spray-wash that out though, and it's a great design, and--can you see?--nicely done. (I assume it was a kit.)
I raised it to $22, went home and looked it up, and it sells for $150+, advertised "As seen on Mad Men (in Peggy's apartment)".
I will raise the price again ($38) and add that info.

With that, it was time to put out the books from the 1970s that I've been saving, though it's not the most exciting selection.
(We continue to get fewer book donations. Though the weather's improved, street life had not, and that scares people away--they'll say as much. ("I don't go there anymore.")
BELOW: some of my display, with some '70s toys too--a 1978 Ginny doll, and that Amazing Maze handheld game, which sells online for a lot, if it's in good shape (this one's not).

The best stuff sold before I'd even taken a photo--another problem with doing displays in thrift...
But it's fun anyway.

II. Dolls, Domesticated

We'd gotten a bunch of doll donations, so yesterday I did another doll display too. They're fairly standard fare for us--in fact, some have come around before. (A couple did come home with me--photos later.)

 

III. Doll in the Wild

I learned this word from Michael:
Apotropaic: having the power to avert evil

At lunchtime, Emmler  invited me to accompany her on a drop-off: she leaves stuff she makes out and about. She was taking out the little doll that she'd painted eyes on and I'd added porcelain flowers to.
The doll had stayed with me over Easter but was starting to march about saying she wanted to "go out, like the others". (Definitely this doll has Emmler's energy, which revs high.)

Emmler climbed up and glued the doll into a crevasse in the bricks on the back of the thrift store--not visible at eye level.

The doll (below) will watch over the alley, Emmler said,
"to make sure the whoors of Slob-Knob Alley only have to have consensual fuckage."
(There's a lot of . . . activity out there, definitely some of it nonconsensual--so we hear--not that the women bother to report it)

Doll is apotropaic!

Emmler looks like Little My, a fierce little person in Moomin world.

She is said to have a 

"fondness for mischief and a cheerfully morbid fascination for disaster and destruction".

Collage: The Cherry on Top

Yay, I did my taxes yesterday! Will I ever learn to put in ONE HOUR of work right away, and thus avoid three months of anxious procrastination?
Heh. Maybe not.

Sadly but predictably, a crisis kept Emmler from yesterday's Art Date. Ass't Man came on his own, and we drank beer, and he sketched while I collaged. It was great to chat & art outside of work.

I. Be the Authority You Wish to See in the World

Mostly, we bitched about discussed work.
Big Boss had told Ass't Man (AM) that Mr Furniture and I were the 2 employees who wouldn't accept authority.
Ha, what a compliment!

I told AM that I'm proud to be in the same category as Mr Furniture! He's my age, a fabric-collage artist who wears Black Panther patches (the political party, not the comic book hero).
AM agreed it was an awesome group of two, and mourned that he himself is such a people-pleaser.

Nothing wrong with pleasing people, I said, but you can't please Big Boss except by never, ever challenging him. And that's not a win for anyone (not even, ultimately, Big Boss himself).

I accept authority, but it has to BE authority.
(When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I wore a button that said QUESTION AUTHORITY.
It didn't say destroy authority.)

Now I might say, Study to BE an Authority.
Like, I'm not just making stuff up in BOOK's.
Well, yeah, I am... but also I follow retail bookstore news--e.g., that Barnes & Noble article I linked to yesterday--and I read about booksellers & libraries.
No one at work reads anything except the Bible and murder mysteries. So, no, yeah--I don't consider them authorities.

I always do feel very nervous when I challenge supposed authority, though. I'm sorry that it's not become easy, emotionally, but I do it anyway if I have to.
Mostly, I just try to fly below the radar.

II. My Collages

 BELOW: Annunciation with Cherries on Top

Ass't Man who trained as a graphic designer, gave me tips on making my cuts smoother, but...
1. I don't want to bother, and
2. I don't want my collages to look like they're Photoshopped. Digital photography, online, tends to smooths-out cuts and seams, so I like the choppy aesthetic--it's clearly hand done.

BELOW: Chipmunk Shepherd Finds the Lost Lamb.
(I brightened the lamb with an acrylic pen because the old holy card was so soft and faded. But, ergh, the lamb's a bit at the wrong angle. Can I blame the beer?)

 

I'm glad that I am a Catholic who loves religion (even if I don't practice it formally)--that allows me to play with the images without being accidentally disrespectful.
If I'm disrespectful, it's on purpose.

To me, these are playful, loving images--what's better than a saint parfait with a cherry on top?

Collage Collabs: We Are Real

Have my fellow Americans done their taxes? You? Months ago?
I've put off doing mine till today, (day off work), the day before they're due.

They're easy--I file a free online form; but this year I've got some fiddly bits (amazingly, I still receive a few hundred in royalties from the children's publisher I wrote for years ago), and... I don't know, I just delay anything of this sort (financial, medical).
I'm not alone in that, I know.

I'll do them and be relieved.

I'm supposed to meet Ass'tMan and Emmler after work for an Art Play Date at a coffee shop.
I say "supposed to" because they both have kids and Emmler's life is a tilt-a-whirl, and if I had to bet, I'd bet one (or both) of them won't make it... 
I hope they do though.
A few other coworkers make stuff too, but this is the first time any of us have met up to make art. I'm bringing paper, scissors, glue, and pictures to cut up.

For my birthday last month, Emmler had given me a collage of Naked Ladies in Puddings that she'd half-finished. I gave the ladies hats (more jiggly desserts) and added animals from a 1950s Little Golden Book, A Day at the Zoo.
I gave the collage back to Emmler for finishing touches a month ago...
I don't care if I never get it back, it was just so good collaborate--to have someone else's starter blocks to push off from.

Below: Part of the collage: Emmler started this off with lady & pie--I added fawn & flourishes (apple jello ring!):

"We Are Real"

Marz didn't intend her collage, below, to be collaborative. She gave it to me a couple years ago, when I was living with HouseMate.
But yesterday I was moved to add to her four characters:
Everybody needed a hat (or a pony) (or a new face--looking at you, Margaret Thatcher).
Also, a llama peaked in.

People above, L to R: Benton Fraser from due South (I gave his hat blue figures that Marz drew long ago);
Penny Cooper;
Margaret Thatcher (I replaced her face with an animal by Marz);
and Marz.

I met Marz in person twelve years ago this spring, when bink & I met up with her in Pamplona, Spain, to walk the Camino de Santiago.
I always say she was like an exploding grapefruit or a tuba in the sun. That could be a good collage. But for now:

! "Be who you are, and be that well."

It's snowing this morning! Two days ago it was in the high 80s and I was wearing shorts and sandals. Time for a quick photo drop before bink comes over for Sunday coffee, then I'm going to see R, my friend ever since the art college library thirty-some years ago. She has her own place for the first time in a long time too--I'm really looking forward to seeing what she has done with it.
What do we do when we can do what we want?

I found an online MLS (library science) program from a state U. I'd just found out state-supported colleges give almost-free tuition to people my age. Does that include classes toward a master's degree? I bet not, but I'll look into it.

BOOK's is under BB's radar, luckily, but between his intermittent heavy-handed pronouncements and the Decay of Civilization right on the store's doorstep (I'm not even writing about a disturbing incident), I am feeling disgusted with work. But not with BOOK's!

How 'bout this fabulous fat exclamation point? I displayed this book face forward and it sold right away.

I had to get this NYPL T-shirt ($4), even though it was too small. I hand-sewed side panels to expand it:

So far only one person answered the question. She was reading St. Francis de Sales. I like his saying,
"Be who you are, and be that well."

And here's a pair of saints--I LOVE these old chalkware statues, and this one's unusually painted.
It's Saint Ann sharing a book with her daughter, the BVM (Baby Virgin Mary).
What are they reading?

 On Ass't Man's suggestion (!), I wrote NOT FOR SALE all over the statue's base and it now lives in BOOK's---up high, blessing us with readerly energy:

BELOW: I'd pulled this T-shirt from baling--it really is pilled, but had to have Princess Leia encouraging reading.... with her gun?
Big Boss did not know who she was. Another example of the cultural gap (chasm) between races.

 

I came across an amazing, hopeful article about the rebirth of Barnes & Noble under new ownership/management of James Daunt--treating each store like an indie bookstore, reflecting its neighborhood...
I approve of his attitude, of course:

“Amazon doesn’t care about books … a book is just another thing in a warehouse,” Daunt says. “Whereas bookstores are places of discovery. They’re just really nice spaces.”

Last picture this morning. I'd saved up Harry Potters till I could put out a full set (or two), plus (incl. cool English paperbacks of the early books).
I'd priced the hardbacks high, for us---$5, 6, 7. Most of these sold within the hour.
(In the case below lies an Indonesian puppet.)

C-KAPE: Old & Money

Time for a new C-KAPE class (Captain Kirk Academy for the Pursuit of Excellence):

How to Old & Money, 101

(That book Kirk's holding---it's The Tale of Two Cities. I wonder if that's where Penny Cooper knows it from...)

I need to enroll in such a pursuit because money is scary to me, and not interesting, so I really don't know anything about finances. But I'd better straighten mine out, since in three years I'll be sixty-five and have to figure out Medicare and when I'm going to claim social security and how I'm going to live when I'm old old.
My finances are pretty simple--I don't own or owe (or earn) much of anything--but dead relatives left me some, and I have a mysterious retirement plan from an old job.

(If you have any tips--reading or video suggestions--on aging + money, please email me them, eh? frescadp at the Big G)

I want to work at least until I'm seventy, health permitting.
It would be prudent get a full-time job that pays more than minimum wage.
And not just for the money. After five years, the dysfunctions of the thrift store and environs are really wearing me down.
With the warmer weather, the drug dealers & co. are out in force across the street again. A couple weeks ago, I didn't have much reaction to news of two gun murders there, and neither did my coworkers. Mr Christian Big Boss didn't even suggest we say a prayer or anything, it's just business as usual.
My (our) hard-heartedness is troublesome (though it also allows me to function without falling apart).
I don't know. I'd be brokenhearted to leave BOOK's. And yet...

Anyway, this morning, I avoided doing my taxes by starting to look into financial things. One of the first things I found was that I am now old enough (62) to take cheap or free classes at the U!

onestop.umn.edu/registration/senior-citizen-education-program

The Senior Citizen Education Program (SCEP) applies to all state-supported institutions of higher education in Minnesota... Residents who are 62 or older may enroll in courses at the University. They may audit courses free of charge, or take classes for credit at $10 per credit, regardless of whether they have already earned a degree.

(I already have a BA from the U.)
I'd been thinking that maybe taking classes would be a good thing, whether I get a new job or not, something engaging and entirely out of the grind. Now I know it'd be financially easy, I'm going to look into summer school!

Literature, Cotton, and Slavery: Why was Heathcliff in Liverpool?

Looking at historic textiles (for Sicilian patterns), I discovered--why didn't I know this?--that fabric was the main currency that European slave traders used to purchase people in West Africa. Specifically, for English enslavers, textiles from India.
(Other trade currency included alcohol, military goods, cowrie shells, etc.)
And Liverpool was the third-largest slavery port in England, and also the commercial hub for textiles from India.
 
Learning that, another piece fit into a puzzle I'd been wondering about: What was Heathcliff was doing in Liverpool in the mid-1770s, and why is he of Indian ancestry?

I'd been surprised when I read Wuthering Heights (1847) for the first time a couple summers ago that Heathcliff is not a white Englishman, like Laurence Olivier.
Emily Bronte describes him as "dark-skinned" and "a little Lascar". Lascars were sailors from India or Southeast Asia in the British navy.
Sympathetic family servant, Nelly, encourages young Heathcliff: "Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen", and she tells him that even if he were black (i.e., African--he's not), a smile would make him more handsome.

At least the filmmakers made-up Ralph Fiennes to fit the description in the 1992 Wuthering Heights, here with Juliette Binoche:

So, what did I think slavers paid with?
I guess... some form of coin?
No.*
I don't know... probably trade goods then?
Yes.
But among those trade goods, I wouldn't have guessed cotton and wool fabric. And yet those were the most popular goods.

Below, from Textiles in the Slave Trade (with more pictures of fabrics)

Once England industrialized in the late 1700s, they started to produce their own textiles instead of importing them from India.
Lancashire county became the leading cotton textile producer, with Manchester as the industrial hub, linked eventually by railway to the port of Liverpool, 35 miles west.
(And GB outlawed slavery in 1805.)

I think British people learn this in school? I had only the vaguest sense of how it all fit together.

Growing up in the US North (midwestern Wisconsin), I do remember learning about the triangle trade in grade school, but remember it as being about rum... which it also was. Maybe we didn't study textiles because it wasn't directly a Northern concern.

Okay, so this clarifies another piece I've been fuzzy about:
why some English merchants and manufacturers supported the Confederacy in the US Civil War (almost a hundred years after Heathcliff was born):
because they wanted the South's cotton. 

And why did I even know about that?
Another book: Gone with the Wind.
Remember? Rhett Butler is a blockade runner---smuggling goods to British ships outside the Union blockade.
And what was he smuggling?
Cotton.

Rhett explains to Scarlett that "the Confederate government allowed him to ship cotton to Liverpool, sell it, deposit the money in English banks, and then use the credit to buy war supplies [and luxury goods] to ship back through the blockade." [--"The Real Rhett Butler"]

And so, during the US Civil War, India again supplied England with cotton.

_____________

The stories make more and deeper sense when I learn the broader history.

"Britain makes little to no sense without its racial history.
It is there in our literature, from Rhoda Swartz, the 'rich wolly-haired mulatto' heiress from St Kitts in Vanity Fair, to Bertha Mason, the 'discoloured' creole wife of Edward Rochester, with her 'blackened' face from Jamaica, who is hidden in the attic in Jane Eyre.
. . .
"Slavery was so intimately woven into the economic fabric of the northern [English] economy that any attempt to unpick it would cause the entire edifice to unravel."

--from this spring's special series in the Guardian (Manchester) :
Cotton Capital: How slavery changed the Guardian, Britain and the world

So, next up for me: Small Island, by Andrea Levy, which the Guardian recommends as "an exploration of the lived experience of empire during the second world war". We have two copies at work.

 

* I thought I'd better check that coins weren't used.
Okay, not coins exactly, but a brass bracelet called a manilla was used as currency in West Africa and in the Transatlantic slave trade.
From the British Museum:

Circle of Life: Sicilian Patterns

The last two prompts for #menchMarch on Instagram were Circle & Life. They spurred me to do something I've wanted to do for a long time:
copy the stitchery on my Sicilian grandmother's dress.

I was mending a holey cashmere sweater of mine at the time, so I stitched the pattern (but wandery) on the sleeve, below, inset:

ABOVE: Photo of my paternal grandmother, Rosaria DeNicola, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, c. 1922. She was born into a family of seamstresses, in Monreale, Sicily.

Sashiko, visible mending from Japan, is all the rage now among menders. I love it too–but it's become boring to see it copied in mend after mend.

To mix it up, we who are not Japanese could also look to patterns of our ancestors for inspiration. They probably won't be mending patterns--most people in the past tried to make mends invisible--but there are tons of surface patterns we could incorporate.

Sicilian Tumbrel

Penny Cooper does not have human ancestors; she always says she is "dinosaur and fern juice".
(Manufactured of plastic in China, the girlettes were based on a story by an Austrian-American about a little girl in Paris--Madeline.)
Hey, I should look at fern patterns! I just thought of that.

But for Penny's school project making a papier-mache mask in Santa Fe, and again for her Easter tumbrel, I looked at Sicilian cart art.

This is the cart that inspired the tumbrel's pattern. (I didn't like the pictures on the outside of this cart. I don't much like the flowery swirls either.)

Sicilian Art

When I was in Sicily, I liked best the strictly geometric (not botanical) mosaic patterns.
Like this [via], from the Cappella Palatina/Palatine Chapel in Palermo.

Art & Genes & Disease

Sitting like a landing pad in the Mediterranean, Sicily was (is) a mish-mash of cultures.
Its medieval art is a mix of
North African Islamic (Fatimid Egypt and Islamic Spain);
Byzantine (Greek Christian, from the Eastern Roman Empire, centered in Constantinople/Istanbul);
and Norman ("Norsemen" Viking settlers in France) who conquered Sicily in the 1100s.
More info: "A Unique Fusion: The Medieval Artwork of Norman Sicily".

Jewish influence, too.
Also influences from Central and East Asia via the Silk Road. Pasta!

My father had his DNA tested in 2016, the year before he died, and all of this turns up in his (our) genes. His genetic ancestry was Italian, of course, and lots of Mediterranean, also Norman, a splash of North African & Jewish, and––this surprised me–– 25% Central Asian. Looking at trade routes, that makes sense.
Everyone stopped in Sicily.
(Also, Genghis Khan.)

Plague traveled the Silk Road too:
"The first reported instance of the Black Death in Europe dates from 1347 when Genoese traders arrived in Sicily after having returned from the Black Sea." [via "Silk Road"]

I didn't know that.
In juicier language, the History Channel reports:

"The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina.
People gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus."

Here's a map of plague routes from the Map Archive:

Penny Cooper Triumphant, III

It's Easter, time for the third annual Penny-Cooper-Triumphant Sydney Carton Memorial Tumbrel Ride. (Two earlier tumbrels.)
 I took my own advice and dared to do it badly, which meant everything is hot-glued together, and ... It works! This year, the tumbrel rolls.
It is a far, far better thing I did...

I hope the 4-second video above works. Here's a still photo too.

Two people asked me what a tumbrel is. I was surprised they didn't know. I'd had to read Tale of Two Cities in high school English, and tumbrels feature.

I looked the word up and learned something though---a tumbrel has two wheels because it's essentially a big wheelbarrow--you can tip it to load and unload manure and other farm stuff. Or to load people to take to the guillotine.
Here's one behind Dirk Bogarde/Sydney Carton:

This, the 1958 film of The Tale of Two Cities, is worth watching. It's free on youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zxfDt5Ejts.
It'd be just another costume drama where even the poor people are spotless, if not for Dirk Bogarde.
Holy Toledo, he's like a mongoose among figurines.

I also learned, separately, that this film was from Bogarde's pretty-boy-plays-doctor days, like Richard Chamberlain as Dr Kildare.
I didn't know he started that way--I only know him from his later European Art Film/Sadistic/Seductive?-Nazi work.
Actually, mostly the first category, especially Death in Venice. I never watched his stuff in the second category, The Damned and The Night Porter, but I've read about it. 

Anyway, Happy Easter!

An unusually strong ancestry of musical aunts? I'm very pleasure.

If I'm more interested in a book's cover– below, paint-on-paper (1950) by designer Elizabeth Friedlander– than in its topic (the piano lessons my mother insisted on didn't take), it normally wouldn't occur to me to read the book's introduction.

But one thing leads to another.

I glanced at the intro's biographical note by Scott Goddard as I was photographing this book to list on eBay (I have a second copy, for its beauty).
The first phrase was so catching– The story of Weber's life should be told rapidly, with short breaths taken in pain– I not only read the whole thing, I went and found the music on youTube.

("Short breaths taken in pain":
Weber died of tuberculosis at thirty-nine. His dates, 1786 –1826, play leapfrog with Jane Austen's 1775–1817 [forty-one years old].)

"an unusually strong ancestry of musical aunts"--I laughed. There is no sentence in the bio that needs improvement.

So, I listened to Daniel Barenboim conducting Weber's Overture to Oberon, and, to nonmusical me, it sounded familiar, like what I expect classical music to sound like.
In the comments, however, was something unfamiliar--a commenter saying they came there because of Sabahattin Ali, with 35 likes:

"I'm very pleasure that I saw here more people found this work after that book like me"

What book?
Who's Sabahattin Ali?
According to this article in the Guardian, Ali was a Turkish writer who was assassinated in 1948 for criticizing the one-party State, but whose 1943 novel, Madonna in a Fur Coat, remains a bestseller in Turkey.

 
In that novel, the hero mentions overhearing Weber's overture on the radio. (This is awkward because it's a Google translation of the Turkish--the book's translated but I can't find this bit in English.)

"One evening, on my way home, I stopped by the neighborhood grocery store and bought some items.
Just as I was going out the door, the bachelor's radio, which was rented in a room across the street, started playing the overture of Weber's Oberon opera. I almost dropped the packages I had on the floor. One of the few operas we went with Maria. That was it, and I knew he had a special love for Weber; he would always whistle his overture on the way.

I felt a fresh longing as if he had only left him yesterday. The pain of the most precious thing lost, wealth, all kinds of world happiness is forgotten in time. Only missed opportunities never come to mind. And it hurts every time you remember it. It's probably because "it wasn't like that!" If there is no thought, man is always ready to accept what he considers destined."

--Madonna in a Fur Coat, Sabahattin Ali

 
And... wrapping back around to Elizabeth Friedlander:
her design for Penguin's 25th anniversary in 1960, via "Elizabeth Friedlander: one of the first women to design a typeface" (lots of images). Of her work, the article says, "What ties the series together is that, however hard to read, they each maintain continual cycles and loops, much like history."

Is the penguin jumping rope?

I'm very pleasure.

 

 

[comments to email welcome. frescadp at you know where.]

George Floyd Square, Good Friday

The Bible after a winter out at George Floyd Square.

Good Friday, 2023

Collages: Space Cat & Animal Land

"Space Cat", for Marz's thirty-second birthday. This is my favorite collage I made this spring.
Walk among the stars!

Also, a smorgasbord: "This Way to Animal Land, II".
The Swedish horse was part of the food spread, the other animals are all from a Little Golden Book from 1957, I think: A Day at the Zoo.
My favorites are the cockatiels on the tea cup.
That's a kinkajou in the tarts.

 

So, I had to go and find the post with my first Animal Land, from 2017, six years ago.
I made it on my birthday, but looking at it now, I see it's Eastery!

Easter Collages

Some Easter collages I made this year, incorporating clippings from 1970's cake decorating catalogs that Kirsten had sent me. Thanks, Kirsten!

BELOW: Astronaut clearing the landing pad, singing to himself, "Pickin' up space bunnies,
And boppin' 'em on the head..."

BELOW: Baby in a Cupcake

BELOW: Egg Cakes Wear Flowery Crowns

BELOW: Moona Lisa Lander Cake

BELOW: To Ganesh, the moon's a balloon

BELOW: Splashdown!