The Moon's a Bunny Balloon...

 ...inflated by a toy dino.
What I worked on this morning--the morning after the SUPER-DUPER BLUE MOON in Pisces last night.
Astrology says, the time is ripe
"to pay attention to hobbies that please you."

I've had these toy parts for months. I'd even used the bunny (with its body) for something else, but it never pleased me.
This does. (Still has some attachment issues.)

This morning I also made a ton of chili-mac for my workmates. I cooked up food from the food shelf (macaroni, fresh mushrooms); the free farmer's market on the bike path (onions, green peppers, tomatoes); food donated to the store (cans of beans, and yesterday we got a box of bottled salsa);
and food I bought with money a volunteer gave me "to help feed staff" (because she, who used to be on the board, knows the score): organic ground beef, shredded cheddar cheese, and tortilla chips.

Remembering the lukewarm reception to the vegan soup a volunteer had brought, I make stuff I know my colleagues will like. Familiar.

Making hot lunch for work on a dime pleases me.
It combines a couple good things: ever since I was a kid I've loved SCAVENGER HUNTS (thrift stores are a relative); and, it calms my rage about how my coworkers are so badly paid, some of them are living on donated bakery.

Post 4444: Toy Bridge

Just a quick one. 

How can we ever (take our blinders off)?

Here! Zadie Smith ^ says in an interview in The Guardian (8/26) something I’m always trying to say—that as a key to understanding attitudes of the past we can look at our own attitudes (biases). How we’ve adjusted to Covid (if we could), for instance, and carry on as normal.

Our “all is normal” bias is a human strength. It can also be a problem. People condemn past generations for tolerating bad things, but don’t we do a similar thing?

Smith on her forthcoming novel The Fraud says she wanted to show how people in Victorian England tolerated or ignored slavery—how they “‘lived on top of a monstrosity.’ 

She said, “There are urgent contemporary parallels. ‘We live on top of a monstrosity now,’ she exclaims. The environmental crisis is ‘the perfect analogy’ to 19th-century attitudes to slavery. ‘When we say, “How could they ever?”, how can we ever?’ She asks. “Are you going to get on a plane this summer? We do it all the time. How can we ever?’”

I love this question—not to condemn but possibly to liberate ourselves—if we can see our blinders, we can take them off, or at least loosen them to look around more. 

Happy Haul!

I waited an hour in line at the food shelf, but it was worth it: I got a great haul for hot lunch at work! [I'd written earlier today about my decision to start looking for free food so I can cook for my coworkers once a week or so.]

I'll keep a few things I got (Greek yogurt, cheese and crackers), but most will become pork stew for work on Monday. I'll take the bars in too, and the candy if I don't eat it all. (I probably will--I have a liiiiittle problem with compulsive overeating of sweets. AS I WELL KNOW, I shouldn't have even picked it up.) I dislike sweet peanut things, however, so I won't eat the bars.

The food selection was very nice, but of course a lot of it was donated by groceries because it's expired, or about to. The meat was frozen, so it's okay--thawing in the fridge. The sliced peppers were not rotten, but a touch slimy, and the mushrooms are on the edge, so I'm cooking the sauce right now, as we speak.

Oh! I have an eggplant in the fridge. I'll cook that up and make a vegetarian version too. Also, one of the guys is Muslim and doesn't eat pork.

 After a very hot and humid week, today the weather is beautiful, and it was pleasant to wait outside. Folding chairs are set up under the portico that runs alongside the church--below, right.
The food shelf is in a church building behind the church itself.

This, above ^ is the view from where I sat at the end--just outside the door to  the food shelf. I attend Mass at this church sometimes, but I'd never gone back here, behind the church.
On the left is the old rectory. A beautiful, big, old building, looking pretty crumbly. I saw the priest going in there, I wonder if he actually lives there. That would be somewhat unusual these days--maybe he just has his office there?

The whole process was friendly and respectful. There's no vetting--anyone can come. It's set up like a grocery store--a few people at a time go in and help themselves. Labels tell you how many of each thing you may take. As many cucumbers as you want! But only one pork tenderloin.

They weigh your food basket/cart at the end, to keep track, but ask no personal questions. The food shelf is open some weekdays too, 11 to 4--perhaps the line is shorter. I'll try on one of my days off.

For today, this is a big win. When I left, I teared up, thinking of how many people work for free to help make this work.
I'm as grateful for the kindness as I am for the items.
________________ 

Luster & Buster, Weir & Weird

I. Luster: a gentle sheen or soft glow, especially that of a partly reflective surface

BELOW: Tea cups with bronze luster (top row, right) & lotus blossom pattern, by Red Wing--1940s;
and (bottom row, left) peach luster-ware by Fire King, 1970s. 

AM was off yesterday and my Book's and Toys were in good shape, so I played in Housewares (his area). It's work that needs doing, but I was only doing the fun tasks. I set up an endcap display, for instance, and took photos for Big Boss to post on the store's social media. I like to have the record too. 

Different volunteers price housewares, and they'd so under-priced the Fire King set that I thought about repricing it. They overprice other stuff though, so I left it, to balance out--getting a steal is part of the charm of thrifting. And pricing is NOT the fun part of work.

By the end of the day, most things on the end-cap had sold, except the lotus tea cups. They don't have saucers... but even if they did, vintage tea cups don't sell. Who drinks 6 ounces of anything anymore?
A customer was admiring them and telling me how she plants little plants in vintage cups, but in this case that would obscure the pattern. One would make a nice receptacle for coins and keys, but don't we already have enough of those?

II. Buster

BELOW: Looking at clowns for the collage board. I'd like to incorporate elements of these:
(L to R) the simple eye lines of Giulietta Masina in La Strada (1954), dir. by Fellini (her husband); Buster Keaton's shallow hat; and touches from Fellini's The Clowns (1970)...

I saw The Clowns when I was little, with my mother, and I'd like to watch it again.
(La Strada is way too sad for me to ever watch again!)
Looking it up, I see it is a faux-documentary. I didn't realize--I thought it was real. Oh--okay--all the clowns are themselves, so that's real--but the movie includes fantastical scenes.
I remember that it was mournful--a tribute to a dying art. 

Reviewer Philip French (who reviewed classic DVDs for the Guardian) a called it a documentary/memoir:

"Fellini saw himself as both a clown and a ringmaster and the circus as a metaphor for life itself, and The Clowns, which puzzled and disturbed audiences with its bitterness, ambivalence and obsession with death, is an uncategorisable combination of documentary, memoir and classic clowning, a sort of fantasia about the history and nature of a dying art form."

(Marz would like French's review of Altman's Three Women--one of her favorite films.)

III. Weir and Weird Reactions

Speaking of favorite directors, the Trylon microcinema is showing films by Peter Weir in September, starting with Witness and including The Last Wave, which I'd loved. (I'm sad they're not showing his Year of Living Dangerously.)

[Save for later: Peter Wier, 2010 BAFTA talk on youtube]

The one I'm most eager to see again is Fearless (1993). Jeff Bridges plays a man who survives a plane crash and enters a sort of free-floating, disconnected, almost mystic state where he is weirdly fearless.

I only saw Fearless once, years ago, but I've thought about the character in my psychological reactions to events of the last few years--esp the murder of George Floyd and its aftermath. Like the character in Fearless, my reaction (though much milder) has included an impatience with trivialities. (Kind of a weird problem, since much of life is naturally trivial.)
I'd have been interested to talk to a therapist who knows something about this "survivor" reaction (instead of that inept therapist who wanted to talk about my childhood).
Gotta look to artists like Fellini and Weir.

BELOW: Camera operator Paul Babin and director, Peter Weir (right) filming Fearless, 1992. From Babin's article "Shooting Myself: Careening Toward Enlightenment in the Entertainment Industry"

 

BELOW: At the end of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, the jaded journalist can't hear the girl who calls to him on the beach. Come, follow me? Like the rich young man?

And now I am going to the food shelf two block away (at the Catholic Church)---to get food for my WORKPLACE!

IV. Free Food

Fed up with management's inaction after I'd told them some of our colleagues are without food, I decided that surely I could feed us myself sometimes, cheaply, or for free. Say, wrangle the makings for chili once a week, and make it in a crockpot at work.

Yesterday I made a sort of beef stew out of odds and ends we had in the cupboard and freezer in the breakroom--including, amazingly, an old but unopened bottle of A1 sauce!
––plus some fresh veggies a coworker had brought from her garden.

I don't use/need food shelves myself, (thank you, dead relatives ❤️), but I will start scrounging for free food to cook up and take to work. In fact, the Society that runs the thrift store is one of the PROVIDERS of free food to this food shelf! Drives me crazy that they don’t feed their own sheep.

Here's what: Easy to criticize others, but what am I doing? It's not what we say, it's what we do. 

_______________

School Clothes

The girlettes are getting excited to go back to school. They attend Möbius Strip Elementary School: 

every year after Labor Day (early Sept.), they start third grade. And every year at Memorial Day (late May), they graduate from second grade. 

They are vague on what they do at school—humans aren’t allowed—but I gather there’s very little time spent at desks. “Unless we want to,” PennyCooper says. 

This year, they’ve been informed that they’ll be starting with a unit on Life in the Water. Clothes for the first day are underway:

Col. Tara, above left, is worried that she will be mistaken for a pink geranium. “I am an octopus!” I assured her that will be unmistakable in context.

Spike is a red-eyed tree frog. (They don’t spend their lives in water, but that’s where they get born.) 

More to come. 

—————

I need some new clothes too. I don’t think I’ll keep this because I don’t like the colors but yesterday I tried on a crocheted toaster cover as a hat. Inspired by Justin Bieber, eh?

———

Not school related…

I started working on the clown board again. I decided against the blinky doll eyes: too small and sad. I’d left the board at work, and that’s being fun—my books-and-toy work area is right next to the tool room. Yesterday I sawed in half a big spool I’d found and set the stems in the holes I’d already punched out for the doll eyes.

The dessert-delivery board is with E now. I’m glad she says she definitely wants to keep collaborating even without AM. He’s much more proficient—with his degree in graphic design—but she’s the real deal, creating out of nothing. He’d added a traffic cop to the board, the cop’s hand raised to stop traffic, perfectly X-acto’d. Visually it fit perfectly, but the feel of it —halt!—was all wrong. And a cop? In this climate? Since AM’s not working with us anymore I felt free to remove it.

I didn’t add much since I last posted it—just the Official Candy Salesgirl pin from Linda Sue (thanks, ❤️LS!).

“dronke as a Mous”

ABOVE: from “Mice with Bad Habits”, by Mouse Parade

“dronke ... as a Mous” is from Chaucer. I think saying someone “suffers from alcohol use disorder” is a kind replacement for the more shaming and blaming label alcoholic, and saying that someone is “not acting in a skillful way” is perhaps more helpful than calling them sinners. 

I would use those terms for others. However, old Anglo-Saxon words such as “drunk” pack more punch. For myself, if I were an alcoholic I might call myself a drunkard, for the poetry of it. And the literary history. 

Similarly, I have taken to calling myself old & fat. That is not damning condemnation, it is blunt fact. I like it! 

Chaucer’s “drunk as a mouse” may be related to this Medieval folk tale, which shows that some things never change. It made me laugh—(I found it on Wikipedia):

A mouse falls into fermenting beer and cries for help. A passing cat offers to pull it out if it will give him a reward when asked. 

However, when the cat later becomes hungry, the mouse refuses to emerge from its hole to satisfy it. 

“What about your promise?” the cat asks. 

“Ah,” says the mouse, “I was drunk at the time.”

Pink(o) Things

A couple pink photos.

I. Display Case Books
Big Boss (BB) has asked me to photograph books for the store's social media. Here is this week's---four pink books in the display case.

BELOW, L to R, clockwise:
1. I'm surprised the Posada book hasn't sold yet--maybe people don't know that they know this Mexican artist--probably from his Day of the Dead prints. Also, at 48, it's not cheap.

2. Jim Klobuchar was a writer for the Minneapolis Star-newspaper, and he was our senator Amy K's father. She mentioned her father being an alcoholic (longtime in recovery) during her interview of Brett M. Kavanaugh, nominated to the Supreme Court.
Jim K. died in 2021--his NYT obit.

3. The two Henry Miller Tropic books sold, but not Black Spring--again, maybe not a familiar name (the title not the author)? Miller liked it though:

"During the ten years I spent in Paris, I must have written seven or eight books. This one, Black Spring, I like the best of all I wrote during that period. It was a wonderful period of my life." [Wikipedia]

4. The 1967 cover of the Ballantine Books paperback The Worm Ouroboros (1922) is so cool. Oh, looking it up, I see it's by Barbara Remington [NYT obit], who created the famous 1965 Tolkien book covers for BB (below). I had those! That's why The Worm cover looked familiar.

But the book itself sounds practically unreadable for someone like me-- "written largely in sixteenth-century English". Though I loved Riddley Walker, which is written in future-speak. But that was about a boy making sense of life hundreds of years after an apocalypse, and this is lords-and-dwarves, Norse-inspired, high fantasy of the sort I skip in Lord of the Rings. (I only read the Frodo-and-Sam-drag-themselves-to-Mordor, World War I– Catholic-inspired parts.)

Due to a tight publishing schedule, Remington illustrated the covers without having read the books.

“I didn’t know what they were about,” she later admitted. “I had sketchy information at best.
. . . After reading his work, I was in awe of Tolkien. I knew there was something special about him. If I read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ first, I don’t think I could have drawn the cover art.”

 

II. Bluey the Alley Protector got caught in graffiti spray paint--now he's pink!
In this instance, I love the interaction with alley life.

("Graffiti" is a word I always misspell! I looked it up for the nth time just now. Maybe I'll remember it if I create a mnemonic?
Let's see...
TWO F's, like fanfare.)

I haven't made any apotropaics since E quit working at the store at the beginning of summer. She was my spark to do them.
Also, before Marz left for Camino, she had borrowed the paint markers I made the figures with, and she hasn't returned them yet.
But that's just as excuse, I could make them other ways.

My main, self-selected challenge is to Make Toys (or Toy-Like Things) (this includes Playing with Girlettes), with or without others.
Working with others spurs me on, for sure, but you can't always count on that--have to figure out ways to make them anyway.
And if you make them, that can lead to getting them out in the world where they'll meet others.

I mean the real-life, in-person, physical world, not online (or not only online).
Social media was a weird double-bind for me.
On the one hand, it was good to have a place (Instagram) to post photos of what I made, to share with other people who make things. 
On the other hand, I spent so much time online, it didn't leave blank  time to get bored, such time in which I tend to make things... or to nap, and then wake up thinking of things to make.
So in the end, I decided IG wasn't good. Surprisingly, I'm actually happier off it, overall.

III. Not pink, but kinda Pinko

Speaking of waking up with ideas... I've been thinking about the gospel story about the rich young man whom Jesus advises to sell all he owns, give the proceeds to the poor, and then to "come, follow me". [in Wikipedia]

I haven't talked to Big Boss about scripture in months, but I broke my own rule yesterday and asked him what he thought about this story.
He gave me the line that so many people use--that Jesus didn't mean we, you and I, should give all our money and possessions to the poor. What Jesus meant, BB said, was that we should give up things we're "overly attached to".*

"Uh-huh," I said. "But for most of us Americans, that probably is money and possessions."

He laughed, and agreed.

This morning I woke up with an American "solution" for the young man, who had gone away sad after the encounter with Jesus.

I pictured a cartoon.
A simple drawing shows the young man returning to join Jesus, traveling staff in hand, sandals on his feet, and calling out,

“I got a storage locker!”
______________________

* BB's Buddhisty-Lite interpretation of the story of Jesus & the rich young man--
"drop your attachments to whatever you're attached to... if you're not too attached to your money, you can keep it"--
that could be okay? though it's kind of a cop-out ("cheap grace" Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it).
But in fact, it doesn't line up with what Jesus says specifically about money and possessions, immediately after the rich man goes away:

It's harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.
(Luke 18:18–30)

It could be argued that people like BB are not rich, but that's wriggling to get off the hook. The point isn't to win a logical argument, the point is to figure out how to live. Which is up to the individual, seems to me. The rich young man has free will...
I wonder what he decided to do after he went away sad.

Astrological Twin, fashion fashion

 Marz, who does astrology, sent me this photo of Justin Bieber, saying,
"He's your astrological twin--Pisces with Scorpio rising".

According to an online write-up, a person with this arrangement "has a taste for complicated situations".
Ha, that sounds right.

"I want us to want to DO BETTER," a line I'd just written, is maybe reflective of that astrological arrangement. (I like astrology but don't have Marz's in-depth understanding.)

Anyway, Marz thought I'd like Beiber wearing a crocheted blanket as a shawl.
I do!
We get a lot of old crocheted blankets at the store--I could wear one... if I didn't have to use my arms. I wonder where he got this one. Perhaps it's manufactured for his clothing line, Drew. You can see the insignia on his pants. The logo sometimes features a teddy bear.

Pisces & Scorpio are "feminine" signs. Some astrologers are rethinking gendered terms; but astrologers have always taught that they represent not biology but energies, like yin/yang--and you can see that in JB.
Remember when he was a teen? he had the vulnerable softness of someone who would grow up to wear oversized pink hoodies with a teddy bear logo. Some love to attack softness, and young JB was trolled hard for being gay (which he isn't).

I feel generally favorable toward JB, but I have nothing insightful to say about the guy. (Geez, he's all of 29 now––I wonder what he'll do in the future.) And I'm not a music person. I don't have much of an opinion on his music.
I have always liked his easy teen song "U Smile" (links to youtube) from 2010--he was sixteen. "Hall & Oates–style blue-eyed soul," a reviewer called it. Listening to it now, I still like it.

Just checked--I have four earlier posts tagged "Justin Bieber", but none are significant.

Windmills? Giants? Adventure anyway!

 "Now look, your grace,” said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails...."

"Obviously,” replied Don Quixote, "you don't know much about adventures."

––Miguel de Cervantes

 
You don't know much about adventures--ha! I love that.
Who would launch into adventures if they had all the facts? 

The art collaboration I'd set up with E and Asst Man turned out to be something of a windmill—or was it a giant?—when AM got drunk the other night and became lewd and mawkish.

I knew, because he'd told me, that AM is alcoholic--(have you heard the new name for alcoholism: Alcohol Use Disorder/AUD?)––but I hadn't  directly experienced it at work with him, though I could see the patterns in his behavior.

When I did experience it directed at me (and E) last week, it was really disturbing.
I have known/loved/lived with a lot of people with mental illness, including my wonderful mother, but (oddly?) don’t have much direct experience with AUD...  It was like, "OH! THIS is what people have been telling me!"

His drunken behavior created something like an earthquake in the ground of reality.

He didn’t say anything about the evening afterward. I avoided him at work and tried to forget about what happened, but--not surprisingly—couldn't. It was like he'd slimed me, and the slime left a residue. 

I finally talked to him about it yesterday. It went as badly as I'd feared it would.
It was like we were acting out a script from a textbook on alcoholic behavior.
He responded with denial ("I didn't say that"); downplaying ("I didn't mean it; I'm sorry you heard it that way");
and blaming me ("I have to walk on eggshells around you").

I'd started out kind and considerate, keeping the focus on me and my experience ("I felt uncomfortable..."); but I foolishly--predictably--ended up engaging, and of course it went nowhere.
The conversation ended with him stalking away, saying "It's always about you!"

Fine. My life IS about me, and I am done with this.
_________________________

I'd suggested 12-steps to AM months ago, when he was really down about his drinking and its possible affects on his young children (not to mention his wife), and he said, no, AA is a cult.

Buddy, if it's a cult, join the cult.
____________________________

As you could guess if you read this blog, I've never loved AM. Losing him as a work friend is only a small loss.
In fact, I'm relieved. It's nice to have a work friend to bitch with, but his unrelenting negativity is mostly a drain. And it seems to get worse. (I think this is classic too--alcohol doesn't make you better.) He almost never comes up with alternatives or fun ideas anymore.
He's barely even decorated the end caps this summer.
When he walked away from me, the last of the slime slid away. 

But I am disappointed that he broke the illusion that we could MAKE ART together with E. That trio worked well... for a minute.
_____________________________

They Might Be Giants is a 1971 movie I saw with my mother when it came out (I was ten)--the title in reply to Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. (The band of that name took it from the movie.)

I am fine! I will continue to do MY WORK--
launching my adventures with
books and toys and making stuff.

A recent BOOK's Display and Toy Bridge:

 

———

NEXT DAY

AM returned his third of the art collaboration. He brought the board to work—he hadn’t worked on it—and left it in my work area without saying anything. If he’s not going to make any changes, I guess I prefer it that way. 

Earlier, E had given my leaping figure a clown face, without eyes. When I got the board back, I added blinky doll eyes.

E is mixed, Black and white—she’d  commented on how pleased she was with the lips she’d drawn. She said white people never guess she is mixed, but Black people see it. (It actually had occurred to me, but only because of working at the store with so many variations of Human, white in the minority—it took years to knock “white” out of first place in my automatic thinking.) 

Reminds me of something James Baldwin said. “White people don’t hate Black people— if they did, we’d all be black.”

Go Up!

I. Mary Goes Up

A little levity, please, it's Assumption of Mary Day!
There was going to be another elaborate parade, but simpler was declared better. More Eastern icon, less baroque.
"All that's needed is a clothesline."

Ta-da! Up, up and away in her beautiful balloon, all the way to Heaven:

Mary was a gift from Linda Sue.
bink is the owner of the clothesline. She's the best costumer and set designer too. She can construct anything.
Leaves for angel wings!
(Mary can't fly by herself, she needs clouds and assistants.)

Rise up! Rise up! They make me laugh.

risible (adj.): directly from Late Latin risibilis "laughable, able to laugh," from Latin risus, past participle of ridere "to laugh," a word which, according to de Vaan, "has no good PIE etymology."

No relation to
to rise (v.): Middle English risen, ... from Proto-Germanic *us-rīsanan "to go up"....
OED writes, "No related terms have been traced outside of Teutonic"
__________________

II. Marz flies in!

I never said: I did find Marz at the airport, home from Camino, no trouble.
Here she is (peach shirt & Crocs), with pilgrim friends in Spain:

She said the lesson of Camino could be summed up,
Never watch television shows you don't want to watch;
or, WALK YOUR OWN WAY.

III. Putting Up Stuff

Back at home, my slogan is:
Do Something. Even if it's wrong, just try something.

One day I was rude (impatient) to a shopper who had lost their child in the store. ALL my coworkers, even the sweetest, were on my side--we all get so disgusted with people who let their kids run wild, tearing stuff up, climbing on furniture with wet shoes, etc. 
But I knew I was out of line.

Cure for frustration and sense of powerlessness:
Take action.
The next day, I printed “watch your kids” signs and hung them up around the store.
I took it upon myself, without asking. Coworkers expressed approval. Again, the curse and the blessing of non-management.

Signs don't change people's behavior--but making them changes mine. Now I won't feel like yelling at anyone. I will help first, and, smiling sweetly, point to the sign second.
Below, I strung a line of twine to hang one in my toy section. Such sophistication.

Working with people can make you kinda hate people. Or it does me, anyway--I've gotta watch that.
What helps?
Take action!
I'm curious about who takes action, who doesn't, why, and what helps me...

Seeing others do it helps.
My coworker Grateful-J is an action taker.
Here (below, left), he's putting up a Japanese paper umbrella that he found--on his own initiative--to replace one a customer stole.
(Maybe they didn't steal it, exactly, but it was hanging as a light fixture, and they took it down and presumably walked out with it, since it didn't have a price tag... because IT WASN'T FOR SALE.)

Now there are two again, softening the obnoxious fluorescents over my BOOK's.

Someone recently donated the last issue of City Pages--printed before Covid forced this free paper to close in 2020--it was the issue that named us as Best Thrift Store.
I framed the cover, adding the clipping naming us, and put it up in the break room. Partly because it was my initiative that got us in the running in the first place; partly because my BOOK's are praised, specifically; and partly because I want us to feel proud... We've got problems, do we ever, but we do good.

I want us to want to DO BETTER.
Best not to get attached to whether others do or don't want that, especially at a workplace like mine (etiolated)--but I like what they say on Camino: Ultreia, "Let's go higher!"

Bring on the clouds.

"Difficult Dessert-Delivery Service"

Here’s the collaboration between E, Ass't Man (AM), and me, so far— a record of its stages.

 

1. BELOW: E got the board started. 
Here she is looking like the cartoon lady, bottom right.

When Asst Man got the board, he said to me, "What am I going to do with this?"

I suggested jellyfish.

2. BELOW, AM's additions:
Two photos of the back of a woman's head; 
two cowboy silhouettes;
and a policeman and a family:

The back of a woman's head... Twice! I too wondered, What am I going to do with this?

But that's the challenge of collaboration.

I was going to try to work in jellyfish myself, but instead went with. . .

3. Difficult Dessert-Delivery

(Em had asked for a prompt, and I'd suggested 'People Living Dangerously'.
And she'd made me a birthday collage with desserts this spring.
So this fits.)

Working with foreign objects is supposed to push you into creative problem solving--and it did. I'm especially proud of having incorporated the woman's head on the right into a jet plane--I seriously considered removing that photo altogether.

Close Ups

The individual sections probably work better than the piece as a whole.

The acrobat hanging from the plane to put a candle in (or to scoop up some of) the cake is my favorite.

 

BELOW: A spaceship is a bit of a cheat--an expected deus-ex-machina,
but that's okay: it's fun!

We didn't set any rules. We could call this one done, or it could make another go-round. I sent photos  and said if anyone wants to swap, it's ready.

Herbert Hoover’s Laundry

I went to the art museum yesterday evening and—laundry! On the line, even (center, left), detail from “Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Bend, Iowa”, by Grant Wood, 1931.

collections.artsmia.org/art/2805/the-birthplace-of-herbert-hoover-grant-wood

I went home and googled “herbert hoover laundry”. 

How ‘bout that:

Hoover attended Stanford University, and to help pay for college, he started a laundry service. He arranged for students’ dirty clothes to be picked up every Monday and returned clean the following Saturday.

I can’t find out who did the laundry—I imagine some washerwomen?

Everyone's talking about...

 . . . laundry!

Penny Cooper notifies me that I am out of synch with the zeitgeist of the blogosphere. She keeps track of such things (admittedly, only when it suits her), tallying topics on a doll-sized abacus and recording them with her yellow pencil in a little notebook.
There were almost no marks in this blog's 'Performance of Laundry' column.

It just so happens that I recently procured a set of labor-saving toy appliances that includes a washing machine. Pensive Bear especially loves to operate the wringer.
Penny's dress was the first to go through.

“Turn Every Page”

Four-sentence movie review, a la Orange Crate Art’s “Twelve Movies” review series [Michael, did you do this movie? I don’t   see a review Update: his review is in the comments]
Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, USA, 2022

The pursuit of excellence is fascinating to watch, often whether you’re interested in the specific undertaking or not. I care nothing about fly fishing, but I loved the descriptions of its gear, tackle, and techniques in the novella A River Runs Through It; and people who don’t care about writing might still be interested in—or at least amused by—the wars fought over semi-colons in Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb —a documentary about the fifty-year working relationship between the two Roberts—Caro, author of the excellent 4-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson (with a fifth volume to come, if Caro lives so long), and Caro’s editor, Gottlieb, who made the work more excellent. 

Maybe the pursuit is fascinating because the techniques of any excellence are applicable to many others, at least metaphorically: the persistence required to stand in a cold river waiting for a conjunction of conditions favorable to catching a fish, for instance, looks something like Caro’s exquisite handling of LBJ’s brother—a fabricator of tales whom Caro had written off, until Caro recognized a change in him after he (the brother) became deathly ill—at which time Caro sat him down at the Johnson family table and asked him what really went on there; and out it came, their father dishing out humiliation to the young Lyndon. 

Turn Every Page winks at the viewer who might think punctuation is a frivolous thing to storm out of a room over, as both of the Bobs do over the years; but punctuation is a tool like other tools that tie things together (fishing flies) or break them apart (atoms)—if you want excellence, Caro conveys, precision matters—and furthermore, in a less elevated application, punctuation is awfully handy for anyone stringing together phrases for a movie review with a four-sentence limit.

5 out of 5 ⭐️ stars
On the Criterion channel and elsewhere


Fishing fly ^ via darkroom.baltimoresun.com/2014/07/fly-fishing-the-art-of-tying-artificial-flies/#1