friends, museums, curiosities and a baby.

so, as we were planning this trip, we got in touch with our good friends marc and dominica to alert them to our impending visit. upon starting our dialogue, dominica (musician, photographer, muse) informed us that a picture she had taken of aitor was going to be hanging in the brooklyn museum from june to august. dominica greeted us upon arrival with the smaller test print she is gracefully modeling above. this is her original:

photo by dominica paige

the photograph will be hanging as part of an exhibit called click, an audience curated show wherein included pieces were chosen based on popular vote (insert some kind of electoral process joke here).

we are actually beginning to accumulate a large number of portraits of aitor. there's the water colour zeesy powers did, at least three retaliatory unflattering portraits, one done by his youngest brother and the oil painting his high school art teacher did of him. is it weird to display them all together? although aitor claims he is not narcissistic enough to hang them all in our living room, he did suggest that i start a shine to him. maybe his contradictions make him such a compelling portrait subject.

today's adventures were all about aitor, since he let me drag him to fabric and yarn shops yesterday. although, to be fair, his interests intersect mine more than mine do his. based on a recommendation from a friend of his, we went to obscura antiques last time we were in town and will probably return every time we come through the city. we can't always afford the things we fall in love with (this time, aitor really vacillated about bringing a display set of fake teeth into our lives) but usually end up settling for some smaller relic of days gone by and dream of someday being mad millionaires with a home full of stuffed skunks and hair wreaths.

the small momento we ended up with this time was a book called 'the affected provinicial's companion, volume one' by lord breaulove swells whimsy. this book has come highly recommended to aitor more than once (apparently people feel he needs to read discussions pertaining to dandyism). as we were leaving, the nice lady at the shop gave aitor and old falling apart medical tome about disease (as it was understood in 1918). it has some great plates in it and since it came to us missing pages, i might be able to disassemble it and make some prints on the pages - i usually have a problem wrecking perfectly good things, especially books and typewriters. also, aitor looked amazing riding the subway with this ancient book. dominica and i decided he was certainly a time traveler whose magic book brought him into our time through some sort of portal or spell.



we also went to the craziest camera store in the world - b&h photo - but that's almost too much to talk about. after that went to macy's to ride around on the wooden escalators and feel thoroughly overwhelmed by the throngs. dominica was pretty upset to find that the wooden stairs on the escalators had been replaced with metal ones. after that and penn station, i felt about ready to implode from all the swarms of people. so i was happy when our friend anda invited us over for drinks and snacks and our first visit with her four month old, sido. sido is an amazingly well natured and charming baby who grabbed her way immediately into our hearts. it was also nice to be back in brooklyn.



after the little one was tucked away, we grown-ups did what any self-repecting art/craft nerds would - we drank dark beers, drew pictures and chatted into the night. it is a mildly cruel to keep new parents up late but i figure this is new york and nobody is supposed to sleep, anyway. and we were all just having too much fun to pull away early.

i never live this much at home.