so midwest.

today we drove and drove.

the whole day we seemed to be passing right before, after or beside big storms. we would see massive cloud formations shooting internal lighting bolts traverse the highway miles in front of us, only to have them move out to the north before we met them; we would arrive in soaking wet places and the sun was shining down again.

when we finally made it to a very moist chicago in the evening, we heard tell of all the tornadoes and severe storms we had spent the day sidling up to from the television of the golden apple diner.

then we found rebecca and the punk rock party she had invited us to. in an act of total non-punkdom, we opted to go to her place and shower the muggy grease off ourselves instead of smearing it on strangers to loud music in a dank basement. i really maintain no punk illusions whatsoever.

and we listened to tales of natural destruction all around us and the warnings of more to come. so we closed the windows.

escape from new york.

today we shoved a visit to the etsy offices into our departure plans. it was quite a whirlwind of a visit - meeting people, seeing the space. it has been almost exactly a year since our last visit (when we were sleeping in the loft and feeling like we had the best loft in brooklyn for a weekend). things have really grown. gone are the days of taking in wayward craftspeople - the lawyers and fire inspectors put the kibosh on both that and the loft we slept in (that apparently blocked the sprinkler system). it was such a whirlwind visit, in fact, that i didn't even snap one picture. i hope to have a somewhat more easy going visit if we manage to get back to new york later in our travels. although, that place is such a hive of action it's hard to ever imagine subdued moments transpiring there.

at the suggestion of some etsyians, we ate across the street at junior's before shoving off. you get complimentary beets, pickles, corn bread and slaw when you sit down. i was full before i even started into the tuna melt i ordered. the melt was pretty disappointing and gross, actually; processed cheese = my american enemy). but they have a six dollar slice of cheese cake that makes you think it might be worth it, so they are clearly capable of minor miracles.

after filling our bellies with jewishy foods, we braved the bridges and tunnels to make our escape. we got lost in jersey city (as i think we always do) but finally made it out of the sphere of new york with its yelling drivers and disheveled signage. we drove into the more amish & quaker climes of pensylvannia, made a pit stop in east stroudsburg to mail some letters and finally settled into a cheap motel in clearfield, pa.

the maid was nice enough to leave this note for us on a dirty envelope:



i'm turning its insides into buttons.

all day brooklyn.

today we took it easier. you know, ate some collard greens, walked around, played with a baby. we did a little more visiting with anda and little sido. i modelled with some of my handmade wares for some pictures anda is trying to amass of etsy sellers. it's for a hand-bound book intended for promoting etsy to the press (which is too bad for me because it sounds like a beautiful project that i wouldn't mind seeing).



because all we do while traveling is pose for pictures, aitor later headed out to pratt to sit for some more photos by dominica.

we rounded our day out with some packing, planning and biking through brooklyn over to the bar where dominica works to have a bit too much bourbon, some pizza and a teetering bike ride home.

brooklyn's nice. i like it.

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.

small adventures attached by tunnels.

today we decided to get some sightseeing in and brave the subways of new york (not for fear of danger but for fear of confusion). i actually developed a perfunctory ability in navigating the subway surprisingly swiftly. it is pretty confounding, though.

aitor really did me a solid and agreed to accompany me to purl and purl patchwork (for those who don't know, two little boutique shops that comprise the pinnacle of a quilter/crocheter's wet dream). in typical new york fashion, they've taken two awfully small spaces and turned them into perfectly sorted treasure troves of imported fabrics, reproductions and fine yarns. it's enough to make a burgeoning craft hag's head pop off gently.





i did really well at not going crazy (accomplished easily enough in my current state of financial alarm) but i allowed myself a few fat quarters for my english paper piecing quilt. that quilt, by the way, has recently expanded to a six year project in my mind now that i kind of want to make two full quilt tops to make it a fully reversible opus (the one side i started in browns, yellows and oranges and another in purples and blues). we shall see if this idea is indeed too mental to follow through on. on second thought, maybe nine years.

thankfully, aitor found a nearby tobacconist to entertain him while i drooled over yardage.

after all of our goofing in manhattan, we met up with melissa who, in the continuation of her staycation, was attending a lecture series called adult education. beyond just wanting to converge with melissa again, i was interested to see the show with my connection to trampoline hall and all. adult education is a very different undertaking from trampoline hall. i was surprised to find out that with four lecturers it ran just over and hour (no question & answers, it would seem). the lecturers are also much more uniformly comfortable performing than at trampoline hall (two were comics, one a writer and one a radio dj). the result is a show that i would place (on my personal spectrum) somewhere between trampoline hall and the comedy i most enjoy creating/consuming. it is much less of a social experiment than a themed exploration to the pits of the arcane - with affable and funny elements clearly encouraged. we all laughed very hard at beatles rip-off bands, cringed at horrifying tales of baby dolls at f.a.o. schwartz, and even sobered up with discussion of violence, reality and the media. then we laughed more at fans of the musical cats.

all told, a fantastic night out.

staycation.

above is the list of events listing clippings that brought melissa into our lives again through trampoline hall last night. as it turns out, she attended a trampoline hall a few years back in philadelphia when the lectures went on tour. the coincidences that surround our growing friendship really are overwhelming.

today melissa introduced us to the notion of the 'staycation' - a vacation wherein you stay in your own city and do the things to do there. melissa's newfound resolution to staycation in new york is also central in her coming out to trampoline hall. today, however, a fever kept her from her job as a third grade teacher and put a small damper on staycationing plans. still, it was nice to have some time to visit, fever or no. oh, and tales of a public school teacher in new york are transfixing.

aitor and i did a bit of ambling through brooklyn where we encountered this armenian man who strongly approved of aitor and/or his facial hair:



i think they look like a pretty happy pair.

aitor did some drawings of melissa in the afternoon and then by evening we had traveled over to our friends marc and dominica's place. marc and dominica are also known as mossyrock - a band you really should check out. they swiftly guided us to a bar with $1 pbr and we all got happily overloaded and then ate pizza. you know, new york is growing on me more and more with every visit. with the friends we have made, it just feels easier to slip into the city instead of just marveling at its grandeur.

what a difference.

today the sun came out, the weather acting as if nothing had happened the day before. i guess we all slept it off and felt better. and what a fantastic day, too. sunny with enough clouds to keep us from totally baking in the sun.

aitor was swamped with unflattering portraits all day (he even had to turn people away) and we finally got to chat with a few vendors and meet new people, free from yesterday's rain and worries of destroyed artwork. i was especially excited to finally get to meet shauna from something's hiding in here. i am been unabashedly flickr-stalking their impeccable loft for months (until shannon and i cut ourselves off for fear that our self-loathing would consume us) and am always a great fan of their wide-ranging output. i'm actually kind of sad that i felt too poor to buy one of their paint-by-numbers america cut-outs. they are pretty freaking genius.

when the fair wrapped up, we took our sweet-ass, exhausted time packing up the car. sadly, we left our binghamton big lots canopy tent in philly after it finally broke beyond repair. i can't believe how sentimental i got about that. i guess aitor's right; i do get too attached to random things. after packing the car so you couldn't slide a dime between any two things, we piled in with my scribbled directions and drove to new york city.

trampoline hall happened to be doing a new york installment that night so we decided to try and make it. i made my usual toronto buttons for the show and was extra excited to see margaux williamson (art director and curator for trampoline hall) do her first ever lecture. as it turns out, our slowness and general traffic got us there at 10:30 so we only saw the last lecture (which was great) and hung out selling buttons.





in an odd instance of fate and timing, this lady melissa walked in moments after us. melissa is someone aitor did a portrait of last year at renegade brooklyn and with whom we recently started an email correspondance. we chatted like school kids and she took us in for the night. oh, this is a picture of melissa from last year, by the way:



now that i look at it, i realize she was wearing the same shirt to trampoline hall. take note: slayer shirts truly are the new little black dresses.