a day of being visionary.

now, this is something i really should have announced earlier but recent events waylaid many of my plans.

today we spent the day as special guests of sideshow, the more-than-a-gift shop at the american visionary art museum. the proprietor, ted frankel, had invited aitor to spend the day there doing unflattering portraits. i was really just tagging along. pictured above are the two tables the staff set up for us - draped with hand painted posters for bollywood movies. ted thought this matched the theme of portraiture. he's he real visionary around there.

now, for those of you doing the math, yes we were celebrating hallowe'en in new york last night. and yes, it is almost a four hour drive. and yes, store open in mornings. we've had no sleep.



in spite of all of this, we did our best to keep ourselves together and had a splendid time. ted is a prince among men and stellar host. we both feel very indebted to his hospitality. an interesting side effect to spending a day doing portraits at a museum is that one gets to interact with visiting tourists from all over. we got to chat with (and aitor got to draw) a visiting professor from little rock, a honeymooning couple and, of course a bunch of the staff at the museum and shop.



i have said it before and i will say it again, you really have to visit sideshow if you are in the baltimore area. they were unpacking thirty boxes of books (my total weakness) when we were there. i showed great restraint in not picking up any of these:



ted seems to have acquired one woman's entire life's collection of craft books dating back to the 1950's. if you are in the baltimore area and are a kindred spirit, i enourage you to pick at least some of these up. they are dirt cheap and i've never seen anything like them. i am just trying to be a touch more minimal in life now. but that doesn't mean you have to be.

school day part two: the hallowe'enening.

in an earlier post, i had teased about a great plan we had for halowe'en in brooklyn. well, i have had no time to announce these plans, but today they were set into action nonetheless.

the big exciting deal was that our friend melissa invited us into her 4th grade class in brooklyn to make buttons and do unflattering portraits with the kids. at first, i was trying to dissuade her from the unflattering portrait aspect of her plan, thinking it would release some kind of disaster upon the classroom. how wrong i was. the kids were totally excited to draw ugly pictures of one another and (unless they were pulling one over on us) totally uncruel in doing them.







melissa, you may remember, is someone we met years ago when she got a portrait done at renegade brooklyn. her class has all seen this portrait and, inspired by it, some of them had already tried their own. one young man has even compiled an entire book of his own portraits. we have been promised a photocopy.





there was so much fun to be had, and so much art made that i had to make and entire flickr set to house all the pictures. hopefully melissa and/or her students can help me remember who drew everything. getting credit is an important lesson for any aspiring artist.

later in the evening, we all (me, aitor and melissa) went into manhattan to witness the insanity of the parade in the village. or should i say, the colonel, beckylope and melissa?

home cooked food and crafts.

the above photos are from the downstairs foyer at my friend dory's place in brooklyn. the hallways there are clearly suffering from some horrible blights.

tonight we were invited over to dory's for dinner (which she cooked for us). pasta, cauliflower, salad. it was a delight! we drank beers from toronto and talked about all kinds of things - crafts, new york city, glass museums, envelopes. ah yes, while in brooklyn, dory has been feeding my gluttony for security envelopes. this evening she unearthed some old british specimens she had had tucked away. i am probably going to make them into buttons right away to cool my nerves.

after dinner, we all retired to the living room to make crafts. aitor was drawing note cards, dory was picking out fabrics for a new baby quilt and i was (unsuccessfully) trying to work on my hallowe'en costume. i might have given up on it. i'm not sure yet. my current state of brain fuzziness has made it a bit easier to give up on things...or, to not bother bothering...not just now, anyway.

regardless of any failures in decorating myself for the best day of the year, it was so great to have an evening that felt normal. homemade dinner and crafts on the living room floor? there is little i could find more comforting.

my father.

today i learned that my father passed away yesterday.

i don't know if a blog is an appropriate place to commemorate people, but i figure it is as good as anywhere - especially if it makes me feel any small amount of better.

among myriad things, my father has always been unendingly supportive of me, my creative endeavors, my choices in life and my freewheeling lifestyle. he had actually been following this blog for quite a while while i travelled. my dad (both my parents, in fact) put my happiness before any pressure for me to achieve fame or fortune. he supported even some of my wildest creative ideas. he let me push him beyond things he had considered before - being interviewed for trampoline hall lectures about my family in the spring, coming to queer film festivals to see movies i was in. my father was very central in letting me feel permission to be who i am, do what i do and live how i live. he was proud of me for artistic undertakings that other parents could understandably have found pointless and confounding. for all these things i am hugely thankful.

above is possibly the last picture i took of him. it was from this past july when aitor and i went to visit. he has purchased some fake colour contacts and went through a phase of switching the eye he would wear one in to confuse acquaintances on the island where he lived. i think it's pretty clear that his legacy lives on in me.

bye, teejay. i miss you already. i wish we could go fishing again together, even if we didn't catch anything.

fleas and friends in brooklyn.

yesterday we spent a great day at the big ol' brooklyn flea. i liked it there. the event has a good vibe, the vendors are nice, the passersby chatty and today the weather was sublime. after a number of hours sitting around, it seemed like none of the friends we had alerted to our visit were going to materialize. new yorkers do have busy lives, after all.

then out of the blue, some friends from atlanta show up - john and travis (pictured above) were there for some flea bargains and unflattering portraits. megan showed up in an act of total surprise (to us). and newly-transplanted canadian pal, dory, also came by to say hi and bring me some security envelopes in person! this makes her the first person to collect on my call for envelopes bargain (although i do have some tantalizing mail submissions coming in...) dory even brought me one i have never seen before!

we also got to spend the evening in the charming company of travis and john, sipping boozy apple cider, eating indian food and chatting.

then, when we got home, aitor had this waiting for him in his email box...

photo by michael dibugnara

...a contribution by one of the day's patrons of the arts who snapped up one of the specialty company's vintage framed limited edition prints. one can only get such gems from the misanthropes in person at fairs, in case you needed a reason to leave your home for some human contact.

it's nice to know we have left some good pieces of us in loving homes in new york.

new york museum night.

look at that grumpy face up there. it couldn't possibly be the face of a young misanthrope about to launch himself into the big city night for some museum browsing, could it?



discovering that friday evenings are free at both the moma and the american folk art museum (the latter has been on our list of places to go on this trip on account of their collection of henry darger's works), we hopped a subway and went into the big bustling city. i am usually not much for big bustling crowds, but it was actually exciting to feel so out on the town after our recent stays in more rural climes. i feel like an even bigger bumpkin that usual and i like that. feelings of wonder can be elusive as one gets older.

we actually arrived at the folk art museum early (a feat i don't think i have ever previously achieved in new york) so we decided to look at some stuff at the moma.





hey, look who got happy fast. we actually didn't go into the moma. it was far too teeming with humanity and felt insurmountable. but there was an outdoor exhibition (well, the second half of an exhibition) about experiments in architecture that we wandered through. there was some neat stuff but we both agreed that we liked this 'house for new orleans' project the best.





i wish i knew more about the designers. i didn't take home any brochures in an attempt to save a tree but couldn't find much in the way of specifics on the moma website (everyone i spoke to there seemed really disinterested, too). what i do remember is that the entire structure is laser cut out of interlocking pieces that can be assembled with only a rubber mallet. these houses are designed to be 'shotgun dwellings' that could be installed quickly in the wake of disaster. unlike the other homes in the installation, this one took place and history into account. i think that is what resonated with aitor and myself. we're a sentimental pair. and the crushing of oldness by newness is acutely evident in new york. they call it evolution but it makes me sad.

from there we were ready for the american folk art museum, next door. it is full of the kind of stuff that aitor and i both get excited about (in respective areas of interest) - quilts, shaker boxes, tooth-shaped trade signs, scrimshaw. but the crowning jewel (to our minds) of their collection is the largest assmbly of the works of a mr. henry darger in the world.



i can leave most of darger's biography to further research on your part. the short story is that he was a man who lived in chicago (and elsewhere in illinois) until the 1970's. he painted compulsively as a way to enrich the huge fantasy world he spent a lifetime creating for himself to spend time in. to this end, he also wrote a 15,000+ page manuscript (that nobody has ever read in its entirely, though two people have tried) called the story of the vivian girls, in what is known as the realms of the unreal, of the glandeco-angelinian war storm caused by the child slave rebellion. darger also kept a weather journal (comparing weather forecasts to actuality) for exactly a decade and wrote a 5,000+ page autobiography.

during our visit, we were fortunate enough to get to talk to the show's curator, brooke anderson, who offered us a bunch of the details and information above (which i hope i didn't confuse). she is also actively looking for a phd student to write their dissertation on darger, as much is still unknown about him and his work. again, nobody has read any of his tomes in their entirety to date.

after surveying their website, i also found this exhibition at their satellite location. hmmm, looks like hallowe'en afternoon is becoming quite full, indeed.

back to the biggest city.

it finally came time to shove off from our motel digs and reenter the land of living. today we drove from our temporary pennsylvania home to the raging wilds of brooklyn. it is stressful to me to even think about a trip to new york. this is mostly because i drive there and it can be a real nightmare to anybody no accustomed to the aggressive flow/anti-flow of traffic.



leaving this strange pastoral town behind us, we were treated to the even more bucolic sights of southern pennsylvania. we even stumbled upon 'roadside america,' a miniature museum that had come highly recommended to us by our friend devil in athen, georgia. sadly, it was just closing as we got there so we had to settle for a visit to the neighbouring pennsylvanis dutch gift shop.



i picked up a few books on topics like witchcraft, superstitions and hex signs, all of which look greatly appealing. i also scored a vintage amish apron. i wonder what i am ever going to do with all these old aprons i keep collecting. whenever i see an interesting design at an affordable price, i can't help myself. maybe if i work on my pattern drafting i can make some reproductions. there are some pretty kick-ass patterns out there.

we finally got to brooklyn and our friends, marc and dominica's place. they are currently touring europe and should be back before we leave. i was totally charmed to be greeted by their tour plottings on the back of their front door when we arrived (pictured above). maybe i should be using a similar sytem of thought bubbles to plan our tours. but ours would have to roll up...