The Requisite X-Mas Post

Well, here's the tree:

I think it looks exactly like last year's tree- although the needles are the longer variety. And this one cost $13.00- half price at Lowe's! (We're boycotting Home Depot as they apparently supported The Orange Menace). I'm glad we scored a tree only a couple of days before Christmas; it lent a modicum of "cheer" to a relatively cheerless holiday! (I mean, the world may soon erupt in a radioactive fireball when The Orange Menace blows us all to Kingdom Come. Heaven help us!)
I know it was this lack of hope and general despair that inspired this year's card.

(Caption inside: "Let's put the X back in Xmas"... who first used that weird abbreviation, anyway?) The image was a nice way of negating this holiday season, if not the rest of the year. Somehow we wound up with 120 cards, not the 60 we had ordered, so we slaved away in our little factory decorating a lot more than we needed before we realized our mistake. I guess we can use this nihilistic greeting as thank you cards or something.
I've had the week off and Bob and I have spent it lurching from social event to social event. I feel fat, logy and generally in hibernation mode. I've been playing an inordinate amount of video games and am surprised at just how easily enthralled I am by them. (In fact, the sillier the better!)

 See? Oh boy! I got to level 35! And I "bought" a Dragon Castle! And more fish! I do find these games relaxing and it sure beats crawling back to bed to sleeping for the next four years. (I've considered that, and I'm sure I have company!)
Don't worry: I have also spent time in my studio and am having fun with that. I have a few new projects in the works- one that I have been dallying with for three years or so involving a World Atlas sort of thing... and more seditious fabric pieces. Something to live for!

My Gift to You: More Free Art Ideas

Latest piece to erupt on that famous studio wall. I guess I'm (not so subtly) addressing the commodification of, well... everything! And certainly art and artists. I generally riffed on the Coca-Cola* style of font with a bit of personal tweaking (gotta make it my own). I especially enjoy playing with typefaces and fonts because my own handwriting is atrocious. (And if you're going to make big long words labor-intensively sewn onto fabric and embellished I think you'd better be able to read what's being written). This piece is about 70 inches long and about 38 inches tall. The edges are decorated with a half a million of those little white plastic tabs that come on the top of milk cartons. (We've been saving them for years so it's nice to finally have a use for them). I don't know if you can see it in a small picture like this, but the background fabric is pictures of International Harvester and John Deere tractors with cozy farmstead buildings and farm urchins thrown in for good measure. Obviously, Big Agra Inc has seen to the commodification of our food industry (thank YOU Monsanto!) and generally in this, the season of Xmas, everything is truly a commodity. Go ahead and commodify me!
And in the midst of all that commodifying, it occurred to me that this is often a great source of inspiration: a single word or phrase that gets caught in my cerebral cortex. I hear a word and maybe hear it again (or sometimes they just spring suddenly onto that TV screen inside my head) and then it sticks and I need to do something with it. The "do something with it"is to make it into an art project and I recommend this to you, if you're in need of prodding or encouragement. Find a word that resonates and illustrate it or illuminate it or just use it as a point of departure. For me, words that catch my fancy are most often political or economic in flavor. I did a whole series of collages that presented Economic Collapse vocabulary: things like Sub-prime Mortgage and Credit Default Swaps. Not only was it a good mental exercise in that I needed to research what the devil these things were but it was a way of making sense out of a pretty depressing scenario. (And then I sold a bunch of them which was good for my personal economy). A large fabric piece from two years back featured the lugubrious "Sequestration". (Anyone remember that?) You can even make a word up, which of course borders on poetry which is (obviously) creative in it's own right.
So for the holidays, contemplate words that reflect the edge of cliff feelings that we're all experiencing right now. "Unpresidented" is a good place to start...

*Probably the single most recognized font in world. I read a really interesting essay on line about how carefully that font was designed. And how it "shouldn't" work, as it has internal inconsistencies and odd spacing etc.

Full Moon

I can't deny it, and the full moon isn't helping: sleep is sometimes a fleeting occurrence. Talking with others has corroborated the clear fact that since the election, sleep disturbances are on the rise. I've been delaying posting to my blog because I didn't want every post to be dominated and preoccupied with recent historic events, but inevitably, the swirling spirals out of control and back towards the election results...
I am still in denial and recent revelations as to Russian hacking doesn't inspire confidence in the November outcome. I have signed so many petitions that I risk carpal tunnel and my inbox overflows with solicitations for donations to fight off the assaults on our freedoms, our resources, our sanity.
Troubling appointments, bizarre twitter rants and refusal to participate in security briefings... all of it adds up to a rather rocky start to the next administration not to mention the Holiday Season. Not much to celebrate here!

(Another omen! A dead mouse appeared at the top of the stairs; I'm not sure whether it's a victim of Robin's developing hunting prowess or a message from the gods!) Suddenly it's a cold dark season and it reminds me of that things are only going to devolve into even darker places. We have no Christmas tree yet, I'll get fatter if I bake Christmas cookies (and I read a story that said people are putting on weight since the election- stress induced overeating) and all my friends and I do is discuss how this happened. So much for Yule Tide cheer!

Oh, and as addendum, some of you will remember that the Bush Administration (Dubya incarnation) was a cottage industry for me. I created what I called "The Presidential Library"- three volumes inspired by the shenanigans and malapropisms of George W. They sold quite well. It says something about the incoming Orange Menace that I have yet to have a single idea or artistic response to his soon to be coronation. Heaven help us!

Robin's First Birthday

Our Lil' Robin! All grown up! Robin celebrated her first birthday in fine style yesterday. Her actual birthday was on Monday the fifth of December, but we had in mind to throw the party on two-for-one pizza night. Several friends- under the weather- couldn't make it but the friends in attendance had a wonderful time and Robin couldn't be happier.

I spent the previous evening decorating and cleaning. (Poor Bob was laid up by the unexpected extraction of a sideways wisdom tooth and was reduced to eating mush and retreating back to bed with a heavy dose of Advil to keep pain at bay. And while we dined on pizza, Bob consumed eggs, squash and mashed potatoes...)

The house looked festive with all the streamers and balloons and our friends were approving of the results (They even noticed the rug as being cleaner than is typical for our somewhat slippery standards. I pointed out that this was due to the fact that I had removed all the semi-chewed logs from the floor.)
So Robin is a smarty pants and realized that the packages I had snuck into my studio were for her. I had to take the presents to work to wrap them! She made out quite handsomely, with our generous friends Sheldon and Louise giving her a new dog-bone motif collar, cookies and a braided rawhide chew bone and there was a delightful rope toy from Bob and Bill:

Look at her haul! She likes every one of her toys. She had a dog food cake with a Pupperoni candle (not lit) while we enjoyed adult drinks and cup cakes. We also serenaded Robin with singing and noise makers... it was quite a lovely event!

 

Robin also received thoughtful cards with an emphasis on her status as a little princess. She looked quite pleased with herself this morning, carefully revisiting all of her new toys. I have told her we will spend part of the day composing "thank you" cards!