The Wondermark comic from the 23rd was awesome.
I'm sewing for victory. Well, or, at least, for my own amusement. Which is a kind of victory.
Another day of browsing WPA posters online. This flickr stream has a huge stash of them. Also: an online exhibit from the Library of Congress. I just ordered prints of some of the hygiene-related ones ("Keen Clean," "Keep Your Teeth Clean") for my bathroom. (Also "No water No guns!") I keep finding ones I love. I think it's because so many of the aims of the WPA--public art, gardening, libraries, and clean teeth--are also my goals. Synergy!
Even the map of their achievements is beautifully designed. I wish the current administration would build more culverts, and design more attractive posters.
John Is Not Really Dull, He May Only Need His Eyes Examined
I got some wedding pictures printed a few months ago (for some of my more old-timey relatives) and I was pleasantly surprised by the experience. I haven't had physical prints made in a long time. It turns out now you can upload them to something called "the Internet," and then the photo store near your work emails you to let you know when they are ready (less than 24 hours later) and then you can go pick them up on your break.
But this led me to a dangerous new compulsion: having fancy little prints made of EVERYTHING I THINK IS BEAUTIFUL. You can see how this is a dangerous road to head down. Because apparently you can print anything that's a digital image. And you know where you can find digital images? The aforementioned "Internet." And you can get these beautiful matte white-bordered prints made for $.39 or something! So in recent weeks I've gotten the following made into prints:
Spotted on the Make blog: rogue cheddar's payphone charms
I'm a big fan of James Thurber, although he's one of those people we don't hear about much anymore, and his children's book "The 13 Clocks" has been one of my favourites since I was small. It's been out of print for awhile so I'm thrilled to see it's been reissued, with the original illustrations, in hardcover, with a new introduction by Neil Gaiman. I may buy a stack of these, save one for myself, and give the rest away as gifts to children of friends who haven't even been born yet.
A couple political-type articles that made me smile:
Margaret Atwood, always eloquent, argues in the Globe & Mail that Harper's arts funding cuts do damage ordinary people, and that ordinary people DO care about the arts. This election (note to non-Canadian readers: we elect a new federal government in 2 weeks) has been such a gong show. I'm not going to link to the articles about Harper plagiarizing speeches, or the Conservative party breaking copyright law; I'm far too depressed.
In Conversation: Gloria Steinem and Suheir Hammad. Gloria Steinem says, "There is no postfeminism—it’s like saying 'post-democracy'!"
This American Life released Another Frightening Show About the Economy, the follow-up to The Giant Pool of Money which aired earlier this year. I didn't understand the mortgage crisis at all until I listened to the first episode, and I'm looking forward to the second one.
Flickr photoset: The Mission Stencil Story, a choose-your-own adventure story graffiti-ed on the streets of San Francisco. "The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text."
New words for the 07 Mirriam-Webster include "ginormous," "smackdown," "speed dating," and (be still my librarian heart!) "gray literature."
From how about orange: Maopost.com, a website devoted to posters from Maoist China. Most exciting, you can submit a photo of yourself and have a custom painting made, in which you are rendered as a "socialist hero." That's so hot. If only I had 169 American dollars... There are also regular, non-personalized posters (actual posters, not copies) for sale, many of them featuring wholesome-looking Chinese peasants going about their wholesome lives, looking utterly untroubled by the acts of bloodshed perpetuated by their regime.* Right on!
After searching for a few minutes, the best relatively cheap similar posters (reprints, not originals) I've found are from China Books. I didn't know it when I woke up this morning, but my unexpected GST rebate cheque may be destined to buy posters. I am all about times of great political strife being reinvented as pop art.
I am so hungry, internet. I am like a hungry, angry baby. But I did quite a bit of real work today, including sending out some VERY professional-sounding emails, so I will be able to go home in 25 minutes with a song in my heart. Plus... and I know you've been waiting for news with baited breath... they fixed the air conditioning, or something! I'm not an air conditioningologist, but it's much much cooler in my office today. Now if only there was a cracker and cheese plate... and maybe some juice boxes... I would be the happiest digital-library-something-or-other in the world.
*I do not mean to suggest that the wholesome peasants are responsible for the regime of Chairman Mao. I realize that it was not their fault, and also, it was probably not their Best Political System Ever. After all, they probably got tired of teaching useless city-slickers how to do various wholesome peasanty things.
Yesterday I totally felt like a Ben Lee song, but today, I feel like a Tom Waits song. And not in a good way.
There is new corporate art on the lawn between the train station and the library... and it's TERRIBLE. I don't know how the university is ever going to be world-class if all our corporate art is made out of rusty repurposed steel. It doesn't even look like art, it looks like a plane crashed and they haven't finished cleaning it up. Couldn't we have something made of marble, or concrete, or even new steel instead of rusty steel?
It makes me depressed, but then, it helps that I was already depressed to start with.
In the garden the snake was a charmer
And Eve said let's give it a try
Now lead us not into temptation
But no matter how hard I try...
-Bell XI
It's Monday, so that means it's link time, although the pickins are a little slim today:
the comic book economy-- a set of scans of old comic book ads. Fascinating and compelling. Hosted on flickr.
pacman's skull, a paleontological miracle as envisioned by an artist. Whose name I don't know because je ne comprends pas le website en francais.
Two crafty sites: burdastyle, an open-source sewing site; and u-handblog, a blog all about sewing handbags. That might sound a little too specific, but believe me, to the obsessed (including me) it makes perfect sense.
My Tylenol/Coke cure totally worked, I feel 80% better today. I should totally be, like, a doctor or something. And I get paid tomorrow so I am totally going to be ordering some things from Etsy. Like cute cards, and an emo wallet. (I'm not posting the links because then someone will buy them right out from under me, you bastards! I know you would!)
thousands strip off for world's largest nude photoshoot. Humanity is so weird.
A lot of people over the years, including my dad and my grade 4 teacher, have thought I was smart. But there is new evidence to the contrary: about four or five times today I have opened my freezer and peered inside, in hopes that some new food would have mysteriously appeared in there, so I could eat it. Isn't there some proverb about that being the definition of crazy--performing the same action over and over again but expecting different results? Oh well. It's not like grade four teachers have never been wrong before.
I am having this bizarrely cheerful day, possibly because the end of the semester is finally feeling real, and because yesterday I put the books for my exhibition in their cases--I have that refreshing sense that even if I STOPPED WORKING RIGHT NOW, refused to bill another hour, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Everything additional I do is just gravy. So I did what everyone does when they feel unusually chipper, like a sudden weight has been lifted: I cleaned my whole apartment. It was like I was channelling some stranger. I even DUSTED. Normally I would rather move than dust. Or, as Carolyn Mark says, "why clean when you can dim the lights?"
Also, I finished reading this book, The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart: 
It's about intrepid, charming orphans, good-hearted narcoleptic adults, and mind control, three elements that appear in most (if not all) great children's fiction. And it was pretty good, if overly long. The main reason I wanted to buy it (or rather, convince my dad to buy it for me), though, was the cover illustration by Carson Ellis. And it turns out that she has done a bunch of poster art for a band I am rather enamoured of, The Decemberists. And then I found a four-foot-long Decemberists poster with art by Carson Ellis, on the internet (where else?) and I ordered it, and now I have some mail to look forward to. (I can't find the poster anymore... it seems I may have purchased the last one on the entire world-wide information superhighway. But buyolympia, where I ordered it from, has free Decemberists MP3s--the legal kind, I assume, since it's from their record label. woot.)
This constitutes crazy, karmic convergence of consumption (or carmic, if you value alliteration over correct spelling). Except not evil like that description makes it sound. For some reason, it makes me unduly happy when things I like are related to other things I like. For example, Sarah Vowell wrote this book of essays I love (Take The Cannoli) and she is on This American Life, which I like beyond what the word "like" can possibly convey. Or Joss Whedon, who has made three of my favourite TV shows in the history of TV shows, does a cameo in the second season of Veronica Mars (which is the fourth of my favourite TV shows in the history of TV shows) in which he says something like, "Renting cars is a basic human need, like eating or sleeping or trying on shoes." And actually, now that I think about it, I read this interview with Ira Glass in which he was talking about how great Buffy is/was. This poster thing might be almost on that Sarah Vowell, Joss Whedon scale, people.
My cheerfulness, then: it's the school thing, and the clean apartment thing, and the books-in-their-cases thing, and the ordering-four-foot-long-posters-in-the-internet thing. Now if only I could solve the food thing. Without going outside.
For no reason other than funniness: sacrilicious!
From Esquire: The Napkin Fiction Project.
An online exhibition called The Willand Suitcase Exhibit. The contents of people's suitcases as they were admitted to a mental institution.
15x15.org is a kind of community art project which displays fifteen 15-second videos submitted by users. Obstensibly this is based on the famous Andy Warhol line about fifteen minutes of fame--except in the sped-up online Information Superhighway world, apparently, everybody only gets fifteen seconds.
I wasn't going to use my fifteen minutes of fame, so I gave it to Lindsey Lohan.
For my children's lit class I am reading Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. Like many people born in the 80s, I guess, I am only familiar with the Disney version of the story. I shall hum "Kiss the Girl" (far and away my favourite Disney song) while I read.
"In the middle of this clearing was a house built of the bones of shipwrecked men, and there sat the sea witch, letting a toad eat out of her mouth just as we might feed sugar to a little canary bird. She called the ugly fat water snakes her little chickabiddies, and let them crawl and sprawl about on her spongy bosom." There you see her... Sitting there across the way. She don’t got a lot to say, but there’s something about her... and you don’t know why,/But you’re dying to try,/You wanna kiss the girl...
A Flickr photoset: NYC Subway Sketches.
I talked to Courtney on the phone, and she convinced me that buying things is the cure to many a bad day. All the stores except Mac's are closed, so I bought some robot/lasergun art from Etsy:
