Month: April 2006

Urban duck parenting

Urban ducks in love

Just in case the crows and cherry blossoms didn’t make you think I was a sappy hippie, here is a portrait of two neighbourhood mallards that seem to nest in inappropriate urban locations every year, and raise their ducklings on apartment lawns.

Last spring I saw a business woman in a power suit and sneakers trying to get a fuzzy puddle of ducklings to stop following her down the sidewalk. Who will be their victim this year? And does the football shape of a duck make you want to tuck it under your arm too, or is that only me?

Paging any unicorns in the area…

Snow cover

My favourite local microclimate effect is the pink snow globe that will sometimes develop on single blocks, where one street’s cherry blossoms are just ripe enough and the wind just strong enough to make it snow cherry petals.

As if it isn’t enough to regularly find sidewalks blanketed in pink flowers, or legitimate drifts of blossoms in the gutters, sometimes we can walk around in air full of swirly pink flakes that smell like cherries. But only for one block.

Something about Victoria’s proximity to the ocean or our particular collection of hills results in very pronounced weather differences between neighbourhoods or across streets. It’s pretty normal to get simultaneous hail and bright sunshine over different parts of your own yard, even.

Consequently we have cherry trees in bloom in different parts of the city from January through almost to June, one pink block here and one there, as each climate pocket hits peak cherry breeding conditions.

Walking past a single fragrant cherry tree is enough to cheer up most people for a few minutes (especially by moonlight!). I’ve had such a prolonged, steady dose now, after four months of spring, that I’m almost ready to cry sometimes when I walk around the neighbourhood and pass through a block-sized cloud of cherry perfume. I’m saturated.

The other side of the street

It’s absurd that this tree blossom marathon is even possible, and we’ve got several weeks to go before the Victoria spring season is over. The chestnut trees have barely started, and I just saw my first lilac yesterday. I might as well be on happy drugs.

I went out for coffee with my friend The Hawk today (a real person, not my spirit animal), and the weather was making it clear that this city was built over a coastal rainforest: windy, rainy, gray. I was grumbling a bit on the way home, in the ritualistic way we complain about weather here, and then I turned a corner and there was a snow globe on Southgate Street.

It was raining flowers harder than it was raining water, and the flip side of the rainy climate was suddenly dominant. We get this surreal rainforest light sometimes, where it’s quite bright, but shadowless because of the cloud filter, and it turns kind of green from reflecting off so many plants. The light makes everything look like it is glowing.

It made me feel a little better about the fact that a couple of generations back, somebody paved over the local cedar groves. At least they put up a ridiculous, Dr. Seussian city, where today, for one block, even the vertical surfaces were getting plastered with airborne flowers. On one side of the street, anyway.

Crow snow tunnel

I was just about to formulate some mental joke about how unicorns or winged foxes (maybe a talking spirit bear?) could appear at that moment without surprising me, when a few crows started collecting sprigs of cherry blossoms, presumably for their nests. Close enough! I can’t even process little black birds growing up in a pink nest. It’s sensory overload.

My mum has this old, ceramic mixing bowl that is robin’s egg blue, and when I visit her I just want to put things in the bowl and look at them. Yellow cornmeal, white or brown eggs, red lentils, black olives, buttons, a toad, chocolate milk, anything, as long as it goes in the blue bowl. Today was like that; I wanted to look at these crows poking around in a glowing pink and green lawn forever!

Activist patterns

I posted this in a discussion about The Grim Meathook Future over on Warren Ellis’ new Die Puny Humans site.

I find all this talk of leaders and critical masses and movements fascinating. To my mind, everything keeps getting more fractured and more complicated and we can’t put it back in a nice tidy box. Simple, reductionist, comprehensible viewpoints only lasted until we built machines that could handle thousands of variables at once. Now look how many things actually have thousands of variables at work. Practically every news story boils down to “it had more consequences than we thought.”

I don’t think any kind of movement will gel. These problems are bigger than human minds can handle, at least the way we’re used to thinking. When, before now, have average peasants fancied they might figure out how to alter the course of every society on earth in this level of detail? I think progress will be about learning to deal with complexity, and not just the parts with catchy names like “emergence” or “the long tail.” Parts like “a land war in Asia” or “we’re all getting cancer.”

Lots of fields have formal techniques for dealing with complexity. “Scale later” in software, etc. I’d be really curious to collect similar patterns from activists or politicians.

Then I immediately thought of a bunch of possible patterns and places to find them. I’m going to post them here, before I go see to what degree my comment has been eviscerated by other puny humans. I can’t believe I said “practically every…” on the internet. Bring on the nitpickers!

These are mostly about compassion.

  • The Fog of War documentary about Robert MacNamara by Errol Morris talks a lot about understanding your enemy and understanding that war is very complicated
  • Cory Doctorow says, “If your popular revolution demands that we give up on popular entertainment it won’t be very popular.” I think that’s a big part of the problem facing environmentalism these days.
  • The Ethical Slut gave me a lot of ideas about getting what I want without imposing on other people, and about finding ways to collaborate.
  • Fernando Flores gave me ideas about using trust as a tool for change, and as a good partner for criticism. I wish his books weren’t so ’80s.
  • I’d really like to hear Heather Corrina’s ideas about patterns for activists, because she spends so much time and energy on activism.
  • Lots of people talk about 80/20 rules, but I like Umbra Fisk’s explanation best.
  • Women, Passion and Celibacy is really angry and ranty, but it had a lot of good ideas about doing without things, in this case sexual relationships. The author compared celibacy to vegetarianism, which actually blew my mind. I like to compare both those things to atheism, and reduced consumerism.

I’m finding underwear really inspiring today

Chris has to get a short haircut for an acting role. We had a little chat, over lemonade, about haircuts and vanity and self-esteem and so on.

We both sounded a little disappointed that identity could get so tied up in haircuts; it seems like a confident person should be able to transcend something as trivial as a haircut, and yet here we are worrying about our ‘dos.

Possible ways to weasle out of this:

  • call it style, or personal expression
  • point out that hair has a big impact on faces, and faces are a primal staging ground for identity
  • turnabout is fair play: sure it’s trivial, so who cares if I care about my hair?

But yeah, weaseling about vanity is hard to do effectively. Once you start pointing out all the things that humans do out of vanity, it gets to be a bit of a sandpit, caving in on you whenever you try to build a way out. If I were still my 16-year-old self, I’d be willing to spin you a reductionist path to the conclusion that everything is vain. Doing nice things for other people? Oh, I guess you just want them to like you so you’re manipulating them with kindness.

Later this evening I realized that I have a similar relationship with underwear as I do to haircuts. I hate wearing boring or ugly underwear, and I sometimes like an outfit better just because I have, e.g., ruffly-backed hipsters underneath. My panty salad contains many colourful frills. This is silly, and yet… I get a lot out of fancy panties.

I’m not in the mood to tie this into the power of costumes, or ornament as communication, or a confession of my own vanity, or any of those angles, but I will happily point out that admiring these overpriced panties is inspiring a lot of jellyfish couture in my head.

This model (meaning the garment) is the most like a jellyfish, with folds and sheer ruffles. It could use some streamers.

Frilled net undies.

These are giving me ideas about new places to add gathers to garments.

Gathered undies

This is only conceptually like a jellyfish, and I admit I had already considered gathers in this location…

Pink, ruched undies.

I’m not sure lace is necessarily jellyfish-esque (too structured, too vertebrate?), but this particular lace arrangement does evoke a muff peeking out, so it gets points from me.

Lace-edged underwear

Lies, all lies

Flavorful prune bread makes tempting cottage cheese sandwiches

A creamed egg and asparagus sandwich for the children's lunch will solve many problems

The biggest lie of all is right in the title, of course.

500 Tasty Sandwiches

I’m going to lobby Galen to include the bit about “Fancy breads, fillings and spreads…” in a Panty Boy song. So poetic, and rich with innuendo. Fillings and spreads is my new code name for pornography.

They are obviously trying to kill me

Ham and peanut-butter sandwich recipe

Several recipes

I don’t know if you can process the solid block of horror in that last photo, but be sure to note that any mentions of vegetables are actually referring to condensed soup. (See also:)

Cover of 'Cooking with Condensed Soups'

(Yes, that’s a cake.)

One true thing, so you don’t die

Tuna sandwiches are even better if buttered and browned in a grill

I would follow that little arrow pretty much anywhere, so it’s good that it’s playing for the one tasty sandwich I can get behind.

I can’t keep these sort of objects in the house— I end up thinking too hard about how kitsch is gross even if it contains rad typography— but I send them to my friends.

Haircut tip

If you get a haircut and you kind of hate it, and you find yourself being a dink to everybody, phoning up your friends and saying things like, “wanna come see my shitty new haircut?”… there is a way to save yourself. I tried styling it a lot, I tried leaving it alone, I tried waiting, I tried whining, I tried optimism, I tried resignation, and what finally worked was taking a lot of grouchy photos of myself until I managed to take one that looked cute.

My new haircut: a rollercoaster

Grouchy self-portrait

Grouchy self-portrait

Grouchy self-portrait

Grouchy self-portrait

Less grouchy self-portrait

Now I like it. I can’t decide if I feel silly or not, for spending 24 hours figuring out how to like my new hair.

Watching people sketch

We ran into Erik and Leni at the show last night and shared their table. I got distracted, watching Erik draw on the back of a poster he ripped down from the bar window. He’s fast, and starts right in on the details without blocking anything in. I took a dark picture of the poster after he taped it up backwards on the window again, but I forgot to look at it from outside when we left.

After that, and spending a lot of time scribbling on our bar table as a group, I was excited to see a little ““watch people sketch online”:http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/12/watch_and_rate_peopl.html” game posted on BoingBoing this morning. But it turns out to not be that interesting. Maybe it has to do with texture? Maybe I only like watching people I know.

Galen is still considering starting some kind of one-thing-every-day blog. Maybe he should post a little video of himself drawing a picture. Like that landscape painter with the happy little trees, but not educational. Spectator art!

How are we going to get all these bears back in?

Orca In The City

Victoria has a history, and I think a proud history, of shitty public art. Until recently, the scope of debate could be summed up as a war between abstract sculptures that annoy old people and hockey fans, and a teeming horde of orcas.

Orca murals, orca mosaics, orca sidewalk chalk, maybe an eagle or a salmon painted somewhere for good measure, but most prominently, a whole army of mass-produced, fiberglass Orcas In The City sculptures, each decorated by a different local artist.

Orcas In The City were bland and oppressive (seriously— the organizers put ‘Arts’ in quotations in their goal statement), but no one was supposed to complain about them because they were only temporary and they were auctioned for charity. Think of the children.

I flipped the bird on one of the more overtly branded Orcas at least once, but I regret never having ruined a tourist’s Orca family portrait by humping an exposed tail flipper or something. I have a lingering vendetta about the Orcas, with apologies to The Children.

Enter Spirit Bears

Spirit Bear featuring a funky neighbourhood scene

Suddenly, this spring, a new menace. Sir Bartholomew is not alone, and he’s even less distinguishable from the other Spirit Bears In The City than was the typical Orca In The City. A spirit bear is a white grizzly bear, if you’re not familiar with Pacific Northwest variations on junior high unicorn-and-kitten fetishes, and the decoration jobs seem to have been rationed out exclusively to the artists who made their Orca contributions look the most like the inside of a Starbucks. It’s wall to wall funky neighbourhood scenes. I know I’m biased towards neon red and blue as the official colours of 2006, but I don’t think I’m alone in believing that yellow and purple should take a well-deserved break. Let yellow and purple recover from their hard work portraying free spirits and Italian snack foods.

Worst of all, the Spirit Bears have broken free of the tourist containment zone and have been popping up as far from the Inner Harbour as Island Blue printers. I yelled out loud when I spotted the specimen at Fort and Quadra.

What’s a concerned citizen to do? How are we going to get all these bears back in?

Toronto got saddled with Moose In The City, so apparently this ride doesn’t hit bottom until it has dipped deep into Canadiana cliché pap. This aggression must not stand! Besides writing to the organizers at the Lions Club and begging them to at least consider funny animals for future mass-blanding fundraisers (goats are a good standby), what is the fitting response?

Three different people have suggested blowing up the bears somehow, but I’m taken with this Knitta Please textile graffiti. I don’t have the time or the tendon health to knit any quantity of bear shrouds, but I think some sewn hoods secured with zip ties would do the trick. As much as the bears stimulate my gag reflex, I’m a non-destructive kind of person and I wouldn’t want to actually destroy someone’s art.

I favour a sign reading “Out of Order” as the finishing touch.

The A that makes me crazy

A sign: Dolce Vita, coffee Art

The strange capitalization puts a lot of emphasis on that capital letter A, and the A is backwards. It’s across a parking lot from a really nice, gigantic, properly-oriented capital A, so you’d think whoever put up that sign would know better. I’m open to the possibility that this was an intentional, very subtle message about the nature of coffee Art, but that makes me even less inclined to go inside.

Almost the same

Rockridge apartments logo

Rockridge apartments logo

There are a lot of handpainted apartment doors in my neighbourhood. I should take better pictures of them.

1044 doorsign

Two Rs that almost match, two 4s that almost match. Repetition with variation might be the Christopher Alexander design thought that I remember most often. I’ve always been into collections of similar objects, and think the slight variations are the root of my fascination. Add them all together and you can see the spectral range of a Rockridge R, or of 1044’s 4s. They put each other in context. I’ve never thought of handwriting as a collection of similar-but-not-quite-the-same objects, but indeed it is.

My desert island would probably be annoying

Ukelele torture/party

I’m with Mark Frauenfelder— a live ukelele weirdo beats the pants off any radio. Who watches that ad and wants to hang out with Mr. Grouchypants?

This reminds me of the Most Wanted/Unwanted Songs project, where researchers attempted to create the most agreeable and disagreeable songs in the history of the world. The disagreeable one was a 25-minute, bagpipe-Opera-rap with clip-clop noises and a chorus of children, and it was awesome. I’ll take that over a bland, romantic, R’n‘B duet any day. Marketing focus groups don’t see things that way, I guess.

I can’t stop watching the ukelele ad. The little white socks!

Ugh, hipster parenting is so vain

Pam sent me a link to this article about hipster parents who are convinced they have tapped into eternal youth. They’ve got the same fashion and music as kids who are 18 or 20, so they figure they’ll be permanently in touch with Kids These Days, including their own.

When you read that article, can you see the veil waiting to be lifted? Vanity is tangible. (Shiver— do I know where mine is right now?)

  • I want to take bets on what a hipster midlife-meltdown will look like. What if it’s spectacular?
  • I wonder how much this obsession with having cool kids has to do with being embarrassed about your own uncool youth? That’s a losing proposition— if a whole generation has a hipster childhood, that’s no longer rare or cool. What a drag. Bonus: you still have the same uncool childhood.
  • I’d really like not to project so obviously on my children, when I get down to breeding. Oh, the irony of trying to be cooler than the cooler-than-thou people…
  • Many critics, I think, tend to miss the point of “generations” by focussing on what amounts to essentialism. I crave the analysis that starts, “Do you have the original mindset to back up that haircut, or are you just another white, middle-class, heterosexual, married, consumer parent with a new coat of paint?”
  • Doesn’t the anti-corporate attitude belong to Generation X, by rights? Are hipsters just Gen-X as a fashion industry, or am I missing something?
  • Those grids of white people… those are really scary, yes?

I have a morbid fascination with hipsters that I’m trying to figure out, obviously. I don’t exactly fit the definition, but I can pass (at this moment I’m wearing sassy glasses and listening to The Fiery Furnaces while making websites and living with an indie musician, for example). I suspect my hipster fascination means there’s some part of me I’m not quite comfortable with.

It might be about identifying with a subculture I don’t entirely support, about not being analytical or conscious enough about my lifestyle. I’m on a real radical-awakenings kick this month, which I know has been simmering unnamed for a long time. A big part of my cringing about hipsters might be that I find the consumerism, nostalgia and vanity really disappointing, but I don’t really know what to do about it or how to be Out and Loud about that stuff, which I suspect is an important thing to do.

Oh, settling into my identity! Forgetting to do it for awhile and then catching up! (That’s a song.)

Jellyfish dress (made from stash)

Presenting: the jellyfish dress As explained last week, I have moved from an obsession with dressing like a jellyfish to action!

I made this comfy dress to remind me of puffy bodies, ruffles and streamers. I was pretty sure it was possible to make jellyfish shapes into flattering clothes, but it’s good to confirm that kind of thing. This is the dress that prooves my concept (to myself). The age of cnidarian wardrobe staples has begun!

Progress on the stash manifesto

The best part! This dress ate the following out of my stash:

  • One fitted floral bedsheet I bought in 1999 to cover a geodesic dome at Burning Man. It didn’t fit my bed, and it had a big hole torn in the middle, but I squirrelled it away, lo these seven years.
  • A length of elastic I bought in 1999, intending to make y-front underwear
  • Three blue buttons from a jar Galen’s mum gave me in 2002
  • Some hook and eye fasteners my gramma gave me for my birthday in 2003, as part of a sewing kit

The only thing I bought was extra thread. (I hope the scope of my stash is becoming clear to you, along with the motivations for my stash manifesto. Ripped bedsheets? Seven years? My collection is ripe, and must be harvested.)

Basic procedure

I used the same strategy I like for web design: make the smallest thing that could work, and add things as necessary. I don’t know much about sewing, so I just tried on pieces in the mirror a lot, to see how they might fit together.

The final cuts looked like this, but I worked it out a little at a time by making the biggest parts first and trying to conserve fabric.

Cutting a ripped, fitted bedsheet to make a jellyfish dress.

The skirt

Jellyfish dress, prancing

The puffy skirt was the clearest part of my jellyfish vision, so I started by sewing a tube using the full length of the sheet, and the width between the hole and the notches.

I gathered each end with elastic to make the tube easy to get on and off and to make sure I could still walk in the cinched skirt. In the mirror, it looked like it needed a ruffle on the bottom, so I added a ruffle on the bottom.

As soon as I tried on the ruffled prototype, I could see how this dress would be both jellyfishy and pretty cute, and there was much excited prancing around in a retro floral potato sack. Galen and Marc get bonus points for being supportive and inquisitive, even though I interrupted the business meeting they were having in the kitchen, and, as they later admitted, neither of them had any idea where I was going with this “it’s a bag/it’s a dress/it’s a man-o-war” design.

The bodice

The remaining fabric had notched corners where I had cut the elastic out of the fitted sheet. I held one notched end up to my chest as a potential bodice, just trying to be thrifty by starting at the end instead of the middle.

The notch happened to make a decent armhole, and the narrow part wrapped around to the middle of my back. That seemed like an easy solution, so after some draping and measuring in the mirror, I cut a matching notch for my other arm.

Rather than mess with facings, I cut a second identical piece and sewed the two together. I.e., I made a something that felt like a pillowcase.

The back and straps

Back of the jellyfish dress

I only attached the bodice along the front of the skirt, to leave room for the elastic to stretch over my hips when I stepped into the dress. To accomodate, I hand-sewed little hooks and eyes under the back of the bodice to keep the skirt up.

This turns out to be a ridiculous fastening strategy, and there is no way I can get it on or off by myself. (The armholes are too snug to wiggle into or out of with the buttons done up, so I can’t twist it around backwards.)

The bodice looked cool from the front, and buttoned together at center back, but the shoulders weren’t attached to anything. Adding straps seemed like the easiest solution.

I thought stubby, straight straps would look like an apron or a work dress rather than glamorously submarine, so I made the straps extra long and let them hang down from the shoulder seams.

When I looked in the mirror, it needed a sash. So I added a sash. I need to learn to tie it in a pretty bow.

If this was knitted, I’d be so uptight right now

Any seamstress could look at these photos and deduce that I have no idea how to sew. Parts of the dress ride up, buckle, wrinkle, tug, sag, etc. I think I learned a lot for next time, especially about bodices (so that’s why side seams are sloped…), and I got a jellyfish dress that fits securely and comfortably out of the experience. Verdict: success! Sewing and I might just become friends.

Dragonfruit spawn and their hedonistic ways

Pot of dragonfruit cacti

My dragonfruit plants should be turning about 4 years old soon. I grew them from seeds I scooped out of a fruit from Chinatown. Supposedly, they are climbing jungle cacti, and will bear dragonfruits, so I cut them a lot of slack about being tiny and idiotic. (Check out that guy in the back. That is a four year old plant that is smaller than the seed of a garden pea!)

Puny-ness notwithstanding, my cacti friends are cool to look at. I’m sure if I put them in a more proportional pot I wouldn’t have to defend them against the teasing of houseguests, but they are so fragile that I’m afraid to exhale too forcefully when I’m near them, nevermind dig them up and move them around. (It has taken four years to get one of them to peek over the edge of the pot. If I kill any now, I don’t think I’ll have the stamina to try again.)

Ever since the seeds sprouted, my dragonfruit have exhibited permanent puberty. Every new growing phase looks like some kind of embarrassing crotch development. (Oh, what you must think of me.) Those spiny branches first emerged as a hairy patch between their first pair of leaves, for example. Now, the two largest specimens are producing little erections. Cute, huh?

Dragonfruit and its new erection

Dragonfruit with little erection on the front