Permission

I’m thinking I’d like to make a tiny print regularly—almost daily, for practice and fun. 

 Today’s tiny print is my permission slip: “Just Do It Badly”

Often my choice is between doing something “badly” —imperfectly, or as a beginner (though both may in turn out to be more pleasing than something precise or “perfect”, there’s always the very real and off-putting risk that it will be a disaster) —or not doing it at all. So, I tell myself…

Photo Round-Up

 bink's due soon for Sunday coffee.
Here's a round up of photos I haven't gotten around to posting...

From Duluth.
Those hills rising from the lake make ice slicks in winter---lots of salt and sand go down.

BELOW: Space alien? Bear + Eagle? What's up with this figure on the manhole cover?  I couldn't find anything on it...

I did go into Speedway to research Big Gulps.
They cost one dollar for 32 oz. of liquid sugar.

BELOW: Another scene from Dirty Dancing--Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Gray practice dance balance on a log across a stream.

Speaking of girlettes, this photo of a Dada ball gives ideas for possible Halloween costumes...

BELOW: Pensive Bear and Penny Cooper in circus costumes.
From a couple years ago--one of my favorites.

BELOW: A bit of current absurdity---an ad for a digital camera that restores an inconvenience of a film camera: NO SCREEN. Because...? Is anyone nostalgic for that?
(Maybe for the Kodak colors, yes.)

BELOW: A side-by-side I set up at the thrift store. I haven't been there much this month, with going to Duluth three times and being busy with printmaking.

BELOW: A snap of the Toy Bridge at the thrift store. Why didn't I buy that flying cow??? (I put it there.)

BELOW: TUTTO PASSA = everything passes
By German printmaker David Schmitt (he lives in Barcelona, Spain) I follow on IG: instagram.com/tuyo.art

Trash Culture Institute

Trash Culture Institute (TCI) is Emily and a loose group of friends making art largely from stuff found in the alleys.
The group came apart almost as soon as it started though, and the printer who made their logo left. *

Not being good at groups either, I am unaligned, but I volunteered to carve a  lino-block for TCI, if Em wanted, for print T-shirts and what-have-you.
Yes! And could I emphasize the "cult" in culture?

My first design--too noisy (ergh, flecks of lino), but on the way:

I was not thinking of this when I made it, but it reminds me of Vienna Secessionist typography.
I like but am not in love with Vienna Secession design. Gustave Klimt, Alphonse Mucha, et al. Too tidy? Serious? Rather... chilly? (Like mid-century modern, which I also do like.)
I don't see any TOYS in it...

Cool stuff though. Take a look at this book Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911, (2023) here:
shop.bl.ag/products/die-flache

[Aren't those TOYS, Fresca, above in Santa's sack?
Hm. Wrong kind. They are chilly toys!]

About the book:  "A landmark of graphic modernism, the Vienna Secession’s magazine Die Fläche (German for The Surface) is brought to life in a complete facsimile reprint...."
____________________
* I hadn't altogether loved the original TCI logo, below.
The dumpster is good, but the type is awfully tight to read. Still, I'm glad to have the T-shirt because the printer who left took his design with him.

Art Drop with Emmler Ann

I'm leaving 'Play to Your Strengths' cards around for the taking. Below, left: bathroom at May Day Café, where I had coffee yesterday with Emmler Ann.
(Below, right: You can remove the paper from under the packing tape--the tape is toothless, had been there a while.)

And, below,
Em had wheat paste at the ready, in a squeezer bottle with a brush to hand. (I've never made it---you just boil flour and water, like making gravy, she said.)
For doing paste-ups of my prints in scurvy places, like this alley by the store.

"Golden paralysis . . . frothy batter"

I picked up the book Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars (2012) by Camille Paglia at the thrift store for Marz, who is interested.

I never cared for Paglia writing on writing--but I have enjoyed (without always agreeing with) some of her outrageous political statements. I'd never read her on art.

This book is so fun!
Here, on French rococo:

"The empty white background of rococo paneling is a willed blankness, a blocking out of unpleasant realities. French rococo interiors have clarity,  they are suspended, elusive, unresolved.
So much pretty motion, and yet so much golden paralysis."

Re the Princess's Oval Salon, by architect Germain Boffrand (1667-1754), 1737. Hotel de Soubise, Paris.

And, of Bernini's Chair of St. Peter, the Vatican:

"Embryonic cupids form like bubbles out of a maelstrom of fertility.
Divine light (whose beam impregnated Mary) seems to be churning and congealing like a frothy batter of scrambled eggs and whipped cream."

Prints Abound & City Research (P.S. Diagnoses)

Going to volunteer at the thrift store today--first time in two, three weeks. I thought I'd go more often, but I've been busy noodling around. (Need to get a job, but not feelin' it...)

Prints Abound

I started putting my prints out and about--that was my idea behind printing them on free industrial paper. But now I see them, I'd rather print them on art paper. Then if people want to take them, they have something nice.

Small prints--business card Fun Sized! Cheaper to print.
I printed "Play to Your Strengths" ^ (on the fireplace mantel at my favorite public restroom--an old park structure at Lake Harriet) on Rives BFK. That is $10/sheet though, so I bought Speedball print paper, $4/sheet.

Also, coming up--bookmarks.

I love making reproducible art, which I hardly ever have--it's easy to give away! I used to do 'Left Art' (as opposed to Found Art, it's leaving things you make out in public), inspired in part by former-blogger Art Sparker, (Susan Sanford--her IG), who used to do a lot of that herself.
And then I made and left Alley Protector (apotropeics), with Em from the thrift store.

I was always a little reluctant to let go of OOAK (one-of-a-kind) pieces, though--it took so long to make/leave one at a time, and I wanted to (and did) keep my favorites.
Now I have so many of any one thing, I want to move them along.

Prints Abound.
Maybe that could be my printer name. I haven't got one yet. Not sure.

City Research: Rest Rooms

Noodling around with my youtube channel too. Met with a friend who said I was being too morbid, I should talk about fun things about aging, like needing to be near bathrooms.
Heh. Finding that a "fun thing" is definitely a sign of age.

But I took note. I'd thought my cemetery-niche video was fun, but discussing pain is definitely not fun. I took note. I don't have a plan for my videos, but I don't want to be too morbid.
That's what led me to the Lake Harriet Restroom--and then to doing a little research.

The restrooms (one men's, one women's) were designed in 1892 by Minneapolis architect and Park Board member Harry Wild Jones.
Closed in 1990, they reopened in 2002 after a $215,000 restoration.
The Women’s rest room really is for resting--separate from the stalls is a six-sided waiting room complete with a fireplace.

City Research: Cinema

One more bit of City Research--found on FB, a photo of downtown Minneapolis, 1971.
What amazed me---the cinema is showing Elaine May's A New Leaf--one of my favorite movies, but slightly obscure (Wikipedia calls it a cult classic).
You can see part of Walter Matthau's name spelled out.

The movie came out when I was ten, living in Madison, Wisconsin. I saw it with my mother, who used to take me to a lot of movies. Sometimes she'd keep me home from school, and we'd go to matinees at now-gone cinemas I can still picture.
The Orpheum, the Capitol, the Esquire, the Majestic.

My report card from third grade shows I missed 35 days of school. I was not sick. Looking back, I see how lonely (bored, uneasy in her self) my mother was to keep me out of school to keep her company, but I loved it!
It was an informal home schooling, a good thing done for a sad reason (my mother's own lack of emotional resources).
____________
The Benefits of Diagnoses

I want to say again, I did NOT mean to dismiss the HUGE benefits of diagnoses of neurological or psychological differences in my previous post.

I was talking about a popular habit of people casually labeling other people who are NOT actually diagnosed--tossing around labels like, "narcissist" ("they must be a _____") --using the term not to further understanding but to name/shame and blame.

But many of us who are older grew up suffering with brain situations (our own or others') that there were no good, accurate names or help for.
I am ALL for increased understanding and help.

Thinking about this, I'm perhaps extra-sensitive to the fast-n-easy throwing around of labels because of how many people dismissed my mother's death with an easy-to-label term:
"Oh, she must have been depressed," many people have told me. Told me!

It gives them an easy handle, and I do understand wanting that in the face of distressing news.
I want to laugh and say in response, "Why no, she was just fine."
But it was far more complicated than that print-n-stick label.

People who wanted to understand didn't tell me, they asked me.

It's a complicated subject, and I was worried I would come across wrong in a short video (why I didn't post it on youTube)---but perhaps I did come across wrong in that blog post.

But let me say, unequivocally:
Our increased understanding and sharing about how brains work is a tremendous good!
Working with autistic students, for instance, I learned that before the Federal IDEA Act in 1975, children with disabilities didn't even have the right to be included in public schools.
That's 21 years after Brown vs Board of Ed ruled against "separate but equal" racially segregated schools.

"In 1975, the United States Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, referred to as the IDEA, which codified the right of all American children to a free and appropriate public education regardless of disability status."

So, yeah for greater understanding, diagnoses, medicines and treatments to help!
But we humans have a tendency to reduce complexities to bumper stickers or fridge magnets (that's the nice version), and that's what I was concerned and complaining about.

Okay, time to go. Have a lovely day/night!

#TinyPrintTuesday

Carving tiny letters is not (yet) my strength: I had to recarve “strengths” (streneths?) twice.

Pain Management: Make some noise

Did you know MUSIC helps with pain? Studies prove it!

Anyone who listens to music knows this, I imagine.
But music is distracting when I'm reading or writing, which I often am (distraction is one of its powers when you're in pain), and I don't listen to much music.

I am starting now--part of my Preemptive Pain Reduction Plan.
No, really, because I miss it.

I am making a playlist.
Here're my first three selections:
ELO's "Sweet Is the Night"
Sly and the Family Stone, "Everybody Is a Star"
Zero8, "Change the World"

A comment on "Sweet Is the Night":
"I used to have to go to the library to listen to this record. That was over 40 yrs ago now. Wow, so much has changed"

Yes. I mostly stopped listening when music went digital. I didn't make the leap.

I found the medical studies about music & pain this morning,  following up my video "Can we stay centered, when in pain?"
It wasn't a rhetorical question, I want to know. I hadn't expected music to pop up--I was thinking meditation and quiet, inner stuff.

Yes, but also--make some noise!

I'd bet making music is even more effective than listening alone (depending on the pain, of course).

I went looking for sacred harp singing (I love that clanging twang) and ended up at the Alan Lomax library on youTube:
youtube.com/@AlanLomaxArchive

Here, "the extended Wootten-Ivey family of Sand Mountain, Alabama, sing "Wondrous Love" from the Sacred Harp. Shot by Alan Lomax and crew, June c. 4-6, 1982":

How many of us sit around together and sing? I NEVER do.
__________________

I also want to know where people stand on the diagnoses of personality disorders and other psychological or neurological states, some of which are thrown around lightly in pop/culture, seems to me.

A few years ago I swore to stop doing that myself--casually labeling someone, "Oh, they're a narcissist; must be on the spectrum", or whatever.
That casual labeling is prevalent in the society around me.
I find it is often more reductive than expansive--making the labeler (me!) more comfortable maybe, but no better than that.

And then at the high school, I saw certain students were diagnosed with heavy-hitting permanent labels when it seemed likely that their behaviors were reactions to impermanent situations around them. (I'm no expert, but talking to them, sometimes I could see and hear this.)

I tried to make a video about that but felt myself too far out on a slim limb. I worried I'd sound like I was dismissing the very real HELP that better understanding of disorders can bring.
Like, I hear people dismiss help for psychological suffering as if it were unnecessary "coddling".
No!
We do not want to go back to the dark ages here.

But, yeah, there're medical papers on this too, like,
"Too Much, Too Mild, Too Early: Diagnosing the Excessive Expansion of Diagnoses" (Int J Gen Med. 2022):

"[Diagnoses] do very much good ....
In this article, however, I focus on the less good aspects of expanding diagnoses. The aim is to enhance the good side of diagnoses (expansion) by avoiding the bad ones...

To halt excessive diagnosing, we must stop diagnosing
a) ordinary life conditions like loneliness and grief (potentially better dealt with by others or left alone)
b) mild conditions, and
c) early signs that do not give pain, dysfunction, and/or suffering (precursors of disease that do not develop into disease, such as obesity, high blood glucose...)"

I hope this all is a regrettable but predictable side-effect of a good thing--the better understanding of and help for human suffering.

 I wish we (I?) would take up more group singing.

Adventures in aging & rice pudding

"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

 __________________________________

I. Setting up my youTube channel, Me, Getting Old(er), is an adventure.

I used to push myself for my blog. I'd venture to unfamiliar places, gather new material (words, pictures, ideas), question people extra, on purpose so I could blog it.
And then, photographing the girlettes also pushed me into the world, to record their play in public.

I've been blogging continuously for seventeen years, as of October 7, and the girlettes have been with me more than seven years. While I still love and enjoy these things (a lot!), I'm so comfortable with them they not agents of adventure for me anymore, or, not often.

So vlogging–– (is that what I'm doing? not even sure yet)––making little videos about me as an old(er) person to post on youTube is welcome:
It makes me uncomfortable!

And it pushes me in a fun way. For instance, yesterday I went into the Welcome Center at the swank Lakewood Cemetery to ask about prices--mostly so I could talk about it online. I wouldn't have bothered taking that extra step just for myself.

I like learning a new site too.
This morning I changed my serious profile photo to one of me laughing--because I'd be more likely to click on such a face--  and I added a banner photo of grass growing on the rocky shore of Lake Superior.
(Hm, this combo--with me wearing what looks like an anorak--makes me appear way more outdoorsy than I am though.)

 
Views of Videos are low (45 is the highest); views of Shorts, which are less than 1 minute, are much higher (528 views). But I've decided I don't want to create sound bytes, I want to hear what I have to say when I ramble.
I think about what I'm going to say, but I don't prepare much because I want to surprise myself. (Also if I prepare, I come across so stiffly I have to delete the video.)
I DO want to get better at keeping the words flowing––and to stop saying "um"!

It's weird to see my face over and over and over...
But that's why I started doing this, because I was SO HAPPY to see a face online that looked like mine---an older woman with gray hair and no concealing makeup. Wanting to see more such, I decided I could be/would try offering what I wanted to see.

 _____________

II. Printmaking pushes me too, though in this case I'm returning to an old project---ink paintings of the ingredients for rice pudding. Years ago I sent these to the blogger of The Crow, Martha. The last time she posted, Nov. 2022, she had completed a course of chemo for breast cancer. 
I miss her.

And I've always kinda missed these pieces too--so I am going to reproduce them as prints!

I'm not sure if I should redesign it as one image to fit on a 5" x 7" card, or print each one separately....
Or print the four as one bigger print.

I don't know.
Printmaking is for sharing, and cards are the easiest to send casually, or to frame, if you like.

Your thoughts and ideas are welcome.

I was surprised that two friends-of-friends recently asked if my prints were for sale. One wanted typewriter cards, and the other said he wanted to "collect all your prints"!
He'll be in town soon, and can some look at them--they're not what I'd consider collectable.
(Well, except The Moth Burial, which I consider a work of art, flaws and all. I am really proud of that.)

It would be nice to sell prints to pay for the materials. I'd like to get some more nice paper (like Rives BFK) and at around $5/sheet, that adds up fast. 
At this point, though, I'm learning and playing.
I gave away most of what I've printed, so I don't have a bunch of stuff for sale, and I don't particularly want to do the work to print more of the old stuff (typewriters) to start selling online.
Maybe eventually? I don't know.
I have to figure out rice pudding!

Burial crepes?

I’ve posted a few more videos on my Getting Older channel—I don’t plan them, not much, because I want to hear what I have to say. And because when I have planned them, my delivery is so stiff, I can’t even use them. Better for me to be a bit hesitant and wandery.

As in today’s 3-minute video, on a topic I hadn’t intended to talk about at all:

“Double-occupancy burial crypts? Maybe not…” Here:

youtu.be/1ddDudzq15o?si=qpNvxVk85lrqC3Kf

I love spell check, Look, burial crepes—I want one!

Memory Delivery Systems

Auntie Vi always liked to help me out with practical items, nice ones like top-of-the-line kitchen gadgets and colorful throw pillows. This didn't stop when she died, naturally enough.

In the first year after Vi's death, a shower curtain––a white waffle cotton one, like new, set out folded on top of a dumpster––showed up right around her August birthday. The second year, same time, a crock pot (with instruction booklet) in the alley. Both were items I actively wanted at that time.

This year, a bookshelf--but not till yesterday. You're late, Auntie Vi!

Yesterday morning, Marz had driven away after a visit, taking her little bookshelf back up to Duluth. It's hers, and she needs it. Textbooks. I'd been using it for printmaking supplies though, and I didn't have a replacement.

I had to stay in yesterday because my right psoas (hip flexor) muscle was locked up. (Painful.) I was reading and feeling a bit put-upon when I saw a neighbor across the street setting out a short bookshelf with a FREE sign.
I hobbled over--the bookshelf was perfect-- and the neighbor even carried it back for me.

It's from IKEA, I think-- nice and deep for holding papers.
Thank you, Auntie Vi, for having been a person I now associate with useful gifts.

The appearance of a couple other things reminds me of people now dead.
My father loved Monarch butterflies, and when a single one floats across my path, I always greet it with his name: "Hello, Daniele!"

The number 8, the sideways infinity symbol, was my friend Barrett's favorite. When I see a lone eight--like, on a scrap on the ground--it gives me a vivid sense of her. "Barrett, it's you!"
_________________

A woman comes out of the fog.
[content note: suicide]

My mother doesn't have a signifier, or not a simple, happy one.
My relationships with Vi, my father, and Barrett were straightforward. Not without strife and (especially with my father) pain, but not complex.

My mother––Lytton––was a maze of a personality. Wonderous, often, but expensive to know, and her death by suicide created a toxic fog, a veil that came down around her life.
She loved me, I don't doubt, but since her death, no one simple object has popped up every so often to announce her loving presence.
Mostly when something reminds me of her, I feel a slicing pain.

I wonder, now that I'm moving into my own old age, beyond where she went, if that veil might lift. Or, if I might move through it, somehow...

If Lytton were alive, she'd be turning ninety this November.
But last year on what would've been her 89th birthday, I had a strong sense that she'd have already died from natural causes by then, and that I didn't need or want to keep commemorating her death day anymore. And I didn't that year, and I won't this year.
It is over and done.

I sense that that (awareness of completion) is and will be liberating, unfogging in some way... I've never found it helpful to PUSH for anything around my mother's death--clarity or gifts or anything. Pursuing books, therapy, projects, etc.
No.

For me, it's been more helpful simply to stay receptive.
It (what? the fog?) moves at its own speed–– s l o w l y ––but it moves.

Go gently.
_____________________

P.S. I had started A Lytton Project, which was great--for a while.
It included some watercolors, which I still love.
Here from 2013:

My mother, Lytton(a) Virginia Davis, twenty-one years old (1955)

I'd told Marz I wasn't sure I could handle painting my mother, it made me feel so heavy, and she said, why don't you paint her things?

BELOW: Lytton's 1956 Buick, her lipstick (orangey), and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes

  _________

P.P.S. Oh! Here's a thing I've felt moved to do and finally did just now:
I went back into my old blog, l'astronave (2007–2023) and deleted the posts I've been double-posting there since I started this blog, Noodletoon, in late 2023.
(Speaking of foggy, some feelings I had about others had fogged me in on that blog.)

I've blogged here long enough, roots have taken hold. I see this as a continuation--on October 7, I'll celebrate my 17th continual year blogging. I am here now.
_____________

I always add:
The suicide crisis lifeline in the US is 988--you can phone, text, or chat: https://988lifeline.org

Happy Fall Equinox!

Fight Club (far right, split lip) was excited for her first costume event! She held very, very still in her Fall Equinox costume this morning (Greenwich time 1:43 PM).
She is doing very well here in all ways. She and Spike started a wrassling club. (Their arms aren't designed for cross-body punch fights, but some of them love to knock each other over and wrassle it out, they think it is hilarious.)

bink helped w costuming and made the two orange and yellow headdresses.

This morning’s linocut: “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

Update: I printed my text on top of an old picture (from the thrift store). First time I’ve tried this…

Original:

So says Pensive Bear. 

Linda Sue, what should we do?

The Girlettes have known Linda Sue as the Queen of Christmas ever since she sent felt stars to be sewn onto our Christmas tree skirt – – plus they have seen her Christmas villages, home to dangerous cut-glass sparkles and dinosaurs. 

I was out with bink for her birthday today and stopped at a thrift store where they had these hollow glass Christmas trees (like you’d get at Michael’s Crafts), new, for a buck each. I got three.

***Linda Sue, or anyone who knows about these things, please advise:  We love these empty trees, but what should we do with them? What goes inside them??? (They are too heavy for dolls to wear.)

After the outing, I got a free Covid vaccine from the university’s public health team. I haven’t had one for at least a year. Every other time, they’ve absolutely wiped me out for about 24 hours, so I’ve got nothing planned… but if I have the energy, I want to start planning Christmas decorations. The Girlettes say we must keep up with the Orphans at Linda Sue’s!

"The original shimmering self..."

I found this comment online--- it is from Frederick Buechner's 3rd volume of memoir, Telling Secrets (1991--FB was sixty-five).

Looking that up, I see Buechner is the source of another popular quote (often misquoted):
He wrote that vocation is the place where. . .
"your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
...Your deep gladness is the call of one's true, enduring and authentic self, the pursuits that engender, not necessarily always happiness, but profound joy."
_____________

Hm... This from Telling Secrets relates to what I'm starting to try to do on my youTUbe:

"It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are – even if we tell it only to ourselves – because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing.

"It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going.
It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own..."

Just this morning a stranger left a comment on the video where I talk about my mothers suicide, simply saying "Thank you for this" and a heart emoji, and I thanked them and replied with that quote.

“How are you, anyway?”

 Today’s linocut. 

So—how are you, anyway? Really.

"Mapping Aging, On My Own"

I kept wondering, WHY do I want to make myself uncomfortable by vlogging about aging?
After three days of making lightweight 1-minute videos about aging, the answer came to me:
Because I am near the age my mother was when she took her own life. Which means, I don't have a model for this next stage of life.

Or rather, I was talking to bink about it and I said--no, wait:
I do have a model––my mother's model––and that's the problem.
It's entirely wrong for me.
I am mapping the territory for myself.

When I realized that, I grabbed my phone and went for a walk to talk about it, and then I posted it immediately on my new youtube channel, Me, Getting Older--because I WANT to share this story. I know I am not alone, that we can help one another.

DESCRIPTION: [content note: suicide]
No judgment, only love: my mother left this life when she was around the age I am now. Why am I so eager to talk about aging—and in public?
I realized 3 days after starting this project that it’s because I want to do it—I am doing it—differently than my mother. An explorer without a guide.
What does that entail?
PS. The suicide crisis line in the United States is 988.

Here it is, Mapping Aging, On My Own  (10 min.)

"Talkin' 'Bout My Degeneration"

Today's Lake Superior Name: Light Blaster.
I'm catching the bus home in three hours, so this is my last morning having coffee at the Duluth co-op. On the way here, I filmed my third little (38 seconds) video.

Marz surprised me by being enthusiastic about my idea of making videos about getting older: "You should make a channel on YouTube". Though it makes some sense--that's the only social media she loves.

Maybe--probably--other people have used "Talkin' 'Bout My Degeneration". I'm not going to dig deep into what other people are posting about aging, though. I know myself: it will frighten me off to see other people doing the same thing--or even not doing the same thing.
If I go ahead with this, I'm going to close my eyes and jump.

I get the sense there's a lot of polarization:
Defy aging! vs. Celebrate aging!
If I had to choose, I'd choose the 'celebrate aging' folks--but, they look so chic. Like Jamie Lee Curtis or the new breed of models with long silver hair.
They don't look like me.
Or they're going sky diving. Looks like marketing.
"Sixty is the new forty."
No, it's not.

Aging is not just a state of mind. I mean, that's part of it and hooray for that. Stay Sproingy!
It's also a biological process, and I'm interested in that. What are my cells doing? Not what they were doing at forty.
Call me Aging Curious.

I'll post my little videos here for a while, where I'm comfortable, readership is low, and hardly anyone I know here in town visits (so I feel less immediately vulnerable). (Hi, bink! You're the exception.)

Me, Being Old(ish), 2

My second unvarnished video (42 seconds) of Being Old. 

Jeez, video is so much more exposing than photos. I don’t enjoy being visible that way, but I want to explore for myself and share what aging is like (for this woman), so I’m going to try this form.

(Unvarnished, unedited, and also entirely made-up on the spot. My hair does need washing today! But my point stands.)

Big Gulps

Drinking coffee at the Duluth co-op again this morning. Going back home tomorrow.
Lake report: It hurts my eyes to look at the bright horizon--the water is playing light ping-pong with the clouds.

Today Marz and I are making chicken potato soup for her upcoming week––with black potatoes from the farmer's market (below). The potatoes are purple inside.

____________

I complimented a woman at the farmer's market on her T-shirt--a cute elf--she showed it to me on her phone case too:

Her father invented this folding saw (to take camping), the Sven-Saw, in 1961. This is her mother using it:

How cool is that?
So cool it's in the running for Coolest Thing Made in Minnesota. It's up against Faribault Mill and their famous blankets, so I doubt it'll win, but I voted for it.

It's like that here, the Outdoors People, the Acoustic Music scene, classes on making syrup from birch trees...

There are also the Big Gulpers.

Marz pointed out that many of the people signing for money or nodding out in vacant lots near her apartment are carrying Big Gulps. You know those? They're 32-ounce plastic cups of pop or slurpees or whatever-sugar liquid. You buy them at quick-mart gas stations.

The Big Gulp is a famous cultural turning point from 1976 (the Bicentennial Year):gulpmportant

"Until 1955, a bottle of Coca-Cola was a mere 6.5 ounces. The Big Gulp represents a point where something changed in a radical way—how much soda we were serving. American drink sizes have been so huge for so long that nearly nobody can recall a time when restraint was the rule."
--Adweek

A song came across my Instagram feed recently--a slim, young, white man singing, "It's your own fault you're fat." (Thank you, Instagram?)

Though it seems he intended it as an insult (I didn't listen to much of it), that could be encouraging: YOU HAVE AGENCY! It's your body!
But either way, it's pure ignorance to proclaim that what and how we eat is purely a private matter.

I doubt this young man is subject to the cravings or hardships of, for instance, people living on the street with addictions.

"There is an underlying connection between addictive behaviors and sugar intake. Sugar can affect the brain in similar ways as alcohol or drugs, giving the user temporary and superficial relief and can be chemically addictive itself."
--"Why Do Addicts Crave Sugar?"

 I first learned about this from where I learn so much: the movies.
Taxi Driver, for instance (1976, another thing from the Bicentennial Year.) Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) takes the young street hooker Iris (Jody Foster) to a diner, and she pours sugar on her toast and jelly.

I'm pretty sure there's a similar scene in Mona Lisa (1986), with another teenage hooker-junkie girl and a would-be rescuer.
I haven't seen that since it comes out. I see now it's a Criterion movie. I should rewatch it. It's research! "Where did I learn about the connection between drugs and sugar?"

Also research--I'm going to stop in the Speedway gas station between here and Marz's and check on Big Gulps. How much do they cost? (Not much, I think.)

Then, time to make chicken soup.
Have a lovely Sunday, all!

The Lift Scene ("Name that Movie")

No one here has yet correctly guessed the movie scene recreated by Low & Pearl in Chester Creek, Duluth.

 

Above, left is the original.

Know it?

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Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey practice lifts in the lake, Dirty Dancing (1987).

Me being older, unadorned

Hm. I’ve never posted a video of myself here. But I was so inspired by  Barbara Scully, an older Irish journalist, posting herself talking without make-up or flattering lighting that, wanting to see more older women talking, I thought I could try it myself. (Oh, and Carol Kane performing a coming-of-age ritual at 73 in Between the Temples inspired me too.) Be the change you want to see, right? So, here’s a 49-second video of me sitting in Marz’s apartment this evening, giving it a try. Absolutely off the cuff…

 

Name That Movie

 Recognize this scene? (Added note: In the movie they are in a lake.)

"What if I want to stay...?"

I. Gray Lady is a siren.

Last night Marz said, "I'm worried I'll want to stay here forever, and then what will I do for work? Maybe I should go into wildlife management..."

BELOW: this morning in Duluth, 7:15 a.m. I'm sitting at the nearby food co-op with my laptop, looking over the lake, drinking coffee. Marz is home asleep.
(Behind the tree tops is water, the top is sky.)

When I first came here years ago, I thought this co-op seating area would always be full because––what a view! But Duluth is built between the lakeshore and the hill rising above it--everywhere you go, this is the view.

For whole hours at a time, the lake looks the same, but often it's a shimmering light show. Or you can't see it at all, covered in fog.
Marz's coworker told her the lake is called the Gray Lady.

Fog City! Last time I visited, the liquor store's broken OPEN sign framed blue sky.

Marz moved here three weeks ago.
In a classic––but not guaranteed–– trajectory, she went from "I'm not going" to I'm never leaving.
(Granted, it's been three weeks of perfect weather; Marz says she'll see how she feels in the winter.)

I get it. I looked into moving here a few years ago, but couldn't leave home.

There's the pull of the lake, but not only the lake--the architecture changes on every block, from crummy shack to Victorian vaudeville theater. Much of it rundown. Much of the city is run down (or worse), but ripe for redevelopment--for climate refugees and people who want to stay.

II. Strike the rock, and water will come forth.

I went yesterday to the downtown alt-movie theater, the Zinema in the Zeitgeist Arts building (above) to see Between the Temples (2024, dir. Nathan Silver).

Between the Temples is a story about how refreshment may come to diminished lives from unexpected sources.
A middle-aged Jewish cantor, Ben (Jason Schwarzman) can not sing since his wife died a year ago.
Enter his grade school music teacher, Carla (Carol Kane), widowed and retired. After an unexpected meeting, she asks him to prepare her for the bat mitzvah she, a red diaper baby, never got.

It's somewhat like Harold and Maude, a movie that was important to me when I was young. As I get older though, I think far less of Maude's story arc. It seems thought up by someone with an immature psychological understanding--someone like Harold, bless him. 

Between the Temple's resolution for Carla (with or without Ben) is a mature insight:
you can come of age at any age.
_____________________

I think of Auntie Vi telling me that her life really started in her seventies: "All my life I took care of other people. Finally I was living my own life."

When I talk about realizing I may have only twenty-some years to live, I'm NOT complaining. It's more an experssion of ripeness.

The "complaint" part is that I need to take better care of my body. This is work. (And I'm not chuffed about pain.) I've skated by on my good genetics, but age wears on every body.
So, I've got work to do, but it's good work, after all.

As for paid work... No word from the art store or the library... But I haven't pushed either.
I had the summer off, but because I'd thought I was going back in the fall, I felt employed. Now I feel newly unemployed and, as such, that I should get a vacation. Heh.

We'll see what comes along.
What's coming along now is breakfast at Uncle Loui's [sic] cafe where I ate yesterday. I'm meeting Marz and a pal of hers who also recently moved up here [independently of Marz, but nice for her to know someone from the past].

Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

Pegasus jumps the Lift Bridge

I spent the day working on a lino print of Pegasus jumping the Duluth Lift Bridge. It’s not there yet…. The lino (below) looks far better than the print. Will try again (maybe).

I got the idea from a photo I took last night of the Mobiloil neon Pegasus on Canal Park, by the bridge whose roadway goes up to let ships into the harbor.  The Pegasus is at Gramma’s Saloon, which hosts the Duluth marathon. 

In Duluth …

 … you can read a house copy of the newspaper (paper) while you eat your pancakes with scrambled eggs.

After I set the paper aside, the gent at the counter (below) came up and asked me if I was done with it.

“Take it”, I said. “It’s all good news.”

He laughed.

Haven’t had an exchange like that in many years.

Life Vacation

I. Madeline: The 'Fight Club' Edition

Jenny Baker, Penny Cooper's cousin, went to live with Emily and her little boy. Theoretically, more than enough girlettes remain, but an absence made itself felt.
I looked online.

There are always lots of "Madeline" dolls, but most are not for us. And then, THIS ONE:
obviously a member of the scrappy Duquette family, looks like she's been running her own Fight Club.

Of course she is coming here.

Life Vacation

And I am taking the bus to Duluth today, for the weekend. It's a mini Art Retreat--I'm taking my printmaking kit.
I have ideas ("The Escape"), but I'm open to inspiration from the place itself. I don't see myself making prints of nature, but it might show up... Who knows?

I took this photo, below, last time I was in Duluth (ten days ago). It's soon to go again, but the weather is perfect and I am unemployed...
= I'm on Life Vacation!

It's different being older, isn't it?
I keep feeling aware that I only have about twenty more years to live, more or less. Twenty-three, if I live to eighty-six like my father.

If I were to live as long as my mother, I'd have only five more years.
Though she didn't die of natural causes, dying at sixty-eight isn't really unnaturally young. "The average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five". [--New Yorker, "How to Die in Good Health"] She had three--though not mentally healthy ones.

The awareness of being a relative short-timer doesn't scare or depress me, it's . . . maybe an impetus? A prioritizer? It's not very much time to create a Body of Work of printed ephemera.
I must get on it!

This woman, Barbara Scully, turned up on my Instagram feed. Scullly is a journalist in Dublin, Ireland, born in 1962, a year after me, and author of Wise Up: Power, Wisdom, and the Older Woman (2022).

She's unkown to me, but I instantly loved seeing her face and gray hair on IG, which is full of people with real bodies, but almost all young.
She talks about stuff like, what kind of funeral do you want?

Speaking of getting on it, I must pack. Printmaking supplies!