Summertime

My blog was down yesterday. I don't know why, but it's working again. Such are the mysterious ways of servers.  Anyhow, during the break I took the opportunity to change the color scheme to green.

I have a friend who objects to my seasonal color changes. He prefers the original background and says I'm confusing my audience by switching my brand. He also strenuously objects to employing any color for the text except black. As a concession to him, I've employed black text this time round; however, I'm assuming that you're not really confused by my new color scheme. It's to celebrate summer -- just like the summer collage I've put up on my bedroom wall to replace the spring one.

Bird Exorcism

Today Christina started painting our dining room. She painted out the hideous birds that had blotted the corners of the molding, but they still lingered there in spirit. Then the horrifying Bird Exorcism occurred. It was pouring down rain when it happened, but since I needed to buy more paint I had go outside. That's when I spied the dead baby bird on our sidewalk. It was as bare of feathers as if it had been plucked, but there were no marks or blood on it; therefore I deduced that it had not been mauled by a cat. I couldn't deal with the sight so I left the body there. On my way back to the house, I detoured around it, feeling upset enough to tell Christina and Bob.

Before the paint job began, we had removed the curtains from our picture window -- so when Christina took a break we all sat down at the table to stare out at the newly revealed stormy gray horizon. Suddenly two black birds alighted on the neighbor's roof. "Those are big birds," we observed. "Like really really large birds." Just then the largest bird swooped down, grabbed the tiny corpse in his mouth and flew away. This was disturbing to witness, but Christina comforted me by saying, "Maybe their baby died in your yard and they've come to get it." Well, that's a morbid scenario, but it's better than thinking they had murdered the poor thing. At any rate, the actual birds disappeared from the roof just a short time after our painted birds vanished from the walls.

A Cup of Stars

Bob is an archaeologist of his own past. He likes to dig things out of our downstairs garage. Today he excavated a bunch of free-writing exercises that he'd written in the mid-eighties. Free-writing as a way of breaking through creative blocks became popular when it was promoted by Natalie Goldberg in her book Writing Down the Bones.You think up a topic, then write a timed exercise using it as your starting point. However, you don't have to stick to topic. You may write about anything that comes to mind.

This method works pretty well for letting your uncensored self run free. In my case, it worked too well. I loved the spontaneity of free-writing, but rarely went back to finish my pieces. After a while my freedom became a prison. To accumulate vast quantities of notebooks filled with indecipherable handwriting is not satisfying. Maybe it was for a number of years or I wouldn't have kept doing it, but in the end what did I have but a bunch of notebooks full of sometimes interesting thoughts and digressions?

Free-writing does have value. It's fun to do with a group. When people share what they've written, the similarities can seem astounding, giving credence to the concept of "group mind." And everyone has something worthwhile to say. But "saying" is the relevant word. The spoken pieces glitter in their spontaneity, but when you look at them later, they often fall apart. Still, there are poetic gems that stand out against the ramblings. I found a couple of brilliant ones when I wandered through Bob's pieces:


What is the sky but a cup of stars overturned above us, 
and the skull but a cup holding the life of our minds overturned? 
The Lord drinks us like wine and we flow through time in this vineyard world.

The Garden of Good Intentions

The temperature has cooled down to a beautiful sunny 70 degrees and I've finally caught up on my sleep. What with all the rain, our yard had gotten out of hand so we hired someone to work on it. He and his brother spent all day working. When they finished, we could see parts of the lawn that we had forgotten existed. Our yard -- such as it is -- consists of the area behind and to each side of the house. In front of the house is an incline filled with boulders. The boulders are covered with ice plants and jade bushes with California poppies popping up in between. There's a flat bit of dirt on top with what's left of our sadly bedraggled rose bushes. There used to be a bunch of unruly Canna plants there, but they were taking over so we had our guy rip them out. Now there's a nice empty area ready for planting. I want to put in loads of lavender and other drought resistant plants because the ground is very dry and it's hard to get in there to water it.

The bedroom side of our house is a no man's land. It's too narrow to plant anything in the space between the houses so we've learned to ignore it. The other side of the house is where the communal garden is supposed to be, but isn't. It's a 'virtual' communal garden, meaning an oblong wooden frame heaped with dirt. During the rainy season, it was overgrown with weeds. Every so often, Bob went out there and cleared it, but then it rained again and within a week the whole mini-jungle was back.

The last time he cleared it, the weeds didn't grow back, but we didn't plant anything and neither did our neighbors. Linda kept talking about the cherry tomatoes that she would plant there 'someday'. She talked about this for months so today I was astounded to see ACTUAL cherry tomato plants lined up in pots against the side of their house. Then Jack started spreading mulch over our so-called garden. He told us that Larry two doors down would be planting lettuce soon. "It's time this started being a communal garden again," he announced. We were thrilled because over the last two years, Bob was the only one doing any work. My knees had given out, Linda and Jack were busy with their kids and Larry has been quite ill. Oh, well, we all had good intentions. (When we first came up with the idea of a communal garden, we were a little looped on wine. That's when we decided to call it "The Garden of Good Intentions.") How apt that title turned out to be, though we're excited by our neighbors' renewed participation. Now we're thinking about what we might plant. I want herbs: parsley, thyme, chives, basil, and tarragon -- and marigolds for a spot of color.

More Art

I spent the afternoon at Cafe Leila in Berkeley with Christina and her art group. They used to meet there to do art, but now they meet there to socialize -- though an art discussion usually enters the conversation at some point. This time the art part was about printmaking. For the last few months, Christina has been making block prints so Cheryl offered to lend her some printmaking equipment.

As I listened to them talk, I found myself wanting to try printmaking, too. I took several silk screening classes when I was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute (we're talking late seventies here), but I wasn't particularly good at it. Silk screening requires patience because you have to do it in careful, planned-out steps. It also requires precision. The ability to measure accurately is a must and I'm terrible at measuring. I'm also not so good at 'neat and precise.'

When I was in school, what I really enjoyed was making mono-prints because it's a one-time deal with instant gratification. If you have a particular effect in mind, you have to be careful because you have only one chance to get it right, but if you're working spontaneously, there's a lot more freedom to play around and this I liked.

Ah, regrets! When I was young, I was always worried about doing it right. Now I wish I'd used the time to let loose with what I enjoyed and see where it took me. Of course, I could do that now.

Woof, Woof

I am somewhat sleep-deprived. I'm slowly catching up, but after three days of sleeping fitfully because of the heat, I'm feeling a bit ragged. I spent much of last night working on my art journal. I started out with two pages of abstract images, but soon filled them up with more tangible objects such as this bulldog and chair. I like this collage. It amuses me. Maybe the heat contributed to my creativity -- or at least to my bulldog tenacity.

Art Day

It was a blistering 93 degrees today. When it gets that hot, I get hyperactive. In reality, I end up achieving very little, but it's more bearable to move around than to sit still in my overly air-conditioned bedroom -- so I drove over to Deb's house and we spent the afternoon making collages. Actually, she made collages while I worked on my art journal. When I first bought the journal, I was afraid of spoiling its pristine pages, but now that I'm halfway through, I'm starting to enjoy myself.  Her collages were great. She used a drawing that Christina had donated to my collection as the background for one of them:

As you can see, it was a perfect choice. She's just finished taking a Photoshop class. Her teacher told her that collage wasn't Art since you were using other people's material and besides, there were copyright issues. Well, my previous experience of techie teachers leads me to the conclusion that
 1. They have very little knowledge of the art world or the history of art, but think they know everything and that you know nothing.
 2. They are under the mistaken impression that they themselves are artists.
 3. They have terrible taste that runs along the lines of Hallmark greeting cards and clashing color choices.
 4. They think art means commercial art.
 5. They think that being technically proficient is all that counts.

OK, I'm making gross generalizations and I apologize to all creative techies out there that I have offended, but this has been my experience with more than one Photoshop teacher. Some of them are perfectly nice people who are good at what they do, but they don't have an art background. This would be OK if they were properly humble about their ignorance, but they're not. Anyhow, the point is that I don't want anyone stifling my friend Deb's creativity!  Besides, who the hell cares about copyright issues unless it's a case of direct plagiarism? Think Dada, my friends. But then you all do or you wouldn't be my friends.

Postscript for Kim: Deb loves your collage, the one I posted on my blog two weeks ago.

Postscript for Christina: Thanks for that drawing. I loved floating it over to Deb; then watching how it magically brought her piece together.

Postscript to Deb: Thanks for the day and for letting me use your collage on my blog.

Shipwrecked

It was so hot that I spent much of the day in my small bedroom. It's the only room in the house with an air conditioner. I spent the time cutting up a picture book of the Titanic for collage purposes. I bought the book for a dollar at a library sale. It seemed a shame to cut it up, but my rationalization was that I wasn't destroying anything rare since it's one of the most popular disasters in our culture.

I have a friend who is fascinated with shipwrecks. I don't think of myself as such a one, but the information that came with the pictures cast a morbid spell. I found myself reading once again about how the management didn't carry enough lifeboats on board and the crew didn't fill the ones they did have up to capacity. Lifeboat #1 only carried 12 people though it had a capacity for 60. And then there are the statistics about how many people perished in third class accommodations as opposed to first class. These chilling statistics gave rise to the rumor (later proved untrue) that the crew locked in the third class passengers so that the rich people could escape first. And the legend of how the band played on nobly as the ship sank: "Near, My God, to Thee." And the story of the girl who was thought to have drowned on board with her mother, but later re-appeared to claim her family's estate. She was proved to be an imposter.

Then there are the details about the ship itself: the exquisite craftsmanship in the carved wooden panels, the crystal chandeliers, the marble fireplaces, the sweeping staircases, the luxuriousness of the staterooms, the coziness of the men's smoking room, the elegance of the women's writing room, the swimming pool, the dining area and so on. The Titanic's fussy Edwardian luxury becomes our version of lost Atlantis.

More Weather

Hot weather arrived right on schedule with the beginning of summer. We celebrated the change of season by going to a party at a friend's house. This friend owns an outdoor hot tub. My body felt too hot to subject it to more heat, but Bob and others took a relaxing soak in the warm water. More power to them. I stretched out in a chair underneath the apricot tree, a perfect spot. I was protected by the shade of the tree, but could still enjoy the beautiful day.

It was 80 or more, a bit too hot for comfort. I know I won't get much sympathy from my friends back east who have been enduring weather in the high 90's, but we're spoiled here. To us 65 to 70 seems normal so when the thermometer leaps up our bodies aren't acclimated. Besides, in the part of California where I live, air conditioning is rare even in public places and the houses aren't designed to stay cool. Our little house is bearable when there's a breeze, but when there isn't, the indoor temperature increases as the day goes on. By evening, it's much hotter inside the house than out. With the sun beating down ferociously through the kitchen windows at dinnertime, it's too hot to even contemplate cooking. That makes for a diet of salads and ice cream or late-night meals.

Bookkeeping

We've been moving furniture out of our dining room so that Christina can paint it. It was full of a number of objects besides the dining room table and chairs: Bob's computer desk and filing cabinets, three tall bookcases stuffed with books and a comfy armchair. Bob did all the heavy lifting, but I'm the one who feels tired. Osmosis, I guess.

When you move stuff, you suddenly start thinking about what you can get rid of -- in my case, books. I donated my Harry Potter series to the library this morning, but the rest of my books are still sitting on the shelf. If I give them away, I'll have room for more, but it's difficult to part with old friends. Thus my tormented inner monologue: I'll probably never read that one again. (I pick up the book and open it.) -- but it has nice illustrations so I'll keep it. (I open another one.) God, I forgot how good this was. Maybe I'll re-read it before I give it away. And so on. No wonder I'm tired.

Groceries

I went to Berkeley Bowl yesterday for groceries. It's like the Whole Foods experience, except funkier and cheaper.

Micro-Climates

After the cool rainy spring, warm weather has finally arrived in the Bay Area. It's not too hot yet, just pleasantly sunny, though the grass in our yard has already started to resemble stalks of straw. It doesn't take much for the green to evaporate in this dry climate. I remember noticing that fact some years ago when we returned from a trip to the UK. When we got off the plane in San Francisco, I was astonished at how dry the air was. It was mid-October. Compared to the England we had left behind, the California sun was bright and glaring, the sky a dazzling blue. Even the colors of the buildings were brighter. I wasn't quite sure I liked it. In comparison to the British landscape with its sooty gray buildings and muted inhabitants, the colors of the California landscape were harsh and garish, the people loud and rude. We had gotten used to a courtly courteous country whose residents apologized as a matter of form. After just a few days' stay in London, Bob and I caught ourselves saying, "Sorry," to each other for absolutely no reason.

But then, California. I remember holding my hands up to my face to shield myself from the light as I squinted at a couple of bedraggled palm trees in the distance. "Why, this is a desert climate!" I thought in astonishment (odd to realize it at that moment since I'd been living in California for decades.) But of course, our weather is not always reminiscent of Arizona's. In the winter when it's gray and foggy, the climate is much more like England's. And if you travel along the coast up to the town of Inverness, the rolling hills dotted with fleecy sheep and huge boulders remind you of the Scottish Highlands (which is why, of course, that it's called "Inverness.") A drive through the wine country takes you to sunny Italy. I won't discuss the rest of the state except to say that Southern California is a foreign country to me. I've been to the UK more often than I've been to Los Angeles.

Paint Samples

Rejects: Flatland, Tawny Taupe, Root Beer Float, Sable Sand, Rich Caramel, Malt, Woodwind and Tumbleweed.

Possibilities:Wicker or Galveston Dust.

The Birds

Last year we painted three rooms in our house. When I say "we" I really mean my friend Christina. Now I've asked her to tackle the dining room, but that room is problematic. It's pale yellow with a bright yellow border along the ceiling. There are also rectangular panels of molding embossed on each section of the wall, edged with elaborate curlicues. The molding is painted pale blue and the corner curlicues are navy blue blobs meant to resemble birds in flight. The overall effect is ghastly, but we've been living with it for years so we're used to it.

Our neighbor told us that the house's former tenant was a hippie house painter who lived here in some sort of menage with a couple of girls. They took off to a commune in the Southwest somewhere; she thinks maybe Colorado or New Mexico. According to her, he painted each room in bright Southwestern colors, (burnt orange, turquoise, and so on) before he and the girls took off for the actual place. When he moved out, the house's absentee landlords concealed the blinding colors with a couple of layers of yellow paint. Since our house is small and sunny, that was a good choice. It gives the rooms a light airy feel and makes the bungalow appear larger than it is. But what's up with the mutilated birds? The first time a guest enters our dining room, his jaw drops in horror.  After a while, though, frequent visitors tend to grow attached to the birds and protest when we talk about eliminating them. I think that's misguided. They could swoop down on you at any time.

Through the Looking Glass

I've spent all weekend buried in a biography of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving (A Strange Eventful History, The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families by Michael Holroyd.) On impulse, I grabbed it off the library shelf without knowing much about who they were, though I'd vaguely heard of Ellen Terry. I knew she was a 19th century English actress. Henry Irving was her acting partner, sometimes lover and owner of the Lyceum Theater. They did Shakespeare, mostly, and portraits of famous historical figures like Beckett and Wolsey, interspersed with Victorian melodrama and comedy. Henry Irving was one for pageantry: luxurious stage sets and elaborate costumes that reflected the taste of the times. That taste was nostalgic for romantic visions of bygone days, Knights of the Round Table and so on. The public wanted their history mirrored back to them as heroic and noble, an England that deserved its empire. Irving's pageantry and dramatic sense gave them that. His productions were front-runners for the historical extravaganzas that came later in the films of Cecil B. De Mille and D.W.Griffith.

But oh, those two were a world-famous acting couple and they knew everybody that was anybody. Lewis Carroll, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Edwin Booth (famous American actor and brother of the infamous John Wilkes Booth), Dickens, Disraeli, Gladstone, The Prince of Wales, the painter John Singer Sargent, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw wander in and out of their lives. (Bernard Shaw, who worshipped Ellen Terry for fifteen years through letters and detested her acting partner Henry Irving, seems particularly obnoxious.)  Bram Stoker worked for Irving for twenty years as his devoted dogsbody. He wanted Irving to produce Dracula on stage, but Irving refused. 

The couple had messed-up home lives, love affairs that didn't last and marriages that didn't work out. Henry Irving left his wife and more or less abandoned his children though he later took them under his wing. They became actors, like him, and carried on his theatrical tradition. Ellen Terry alternately ignored or smothered her children with mother love. Her daughter lived with her in a love-hate power struggle and later became a suffragette. Her son wandered all over Europe to get away from her. He had an affair (and a child) with Isadora Duncan and worked with Stanislavsky as a set designer in turn-of-the-century Russian experimental theater. The list of famous names changes with the generations: Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf make their appearances. John Gielgud, by the way, was the great-nephew of Ellen Terry.

Assorted Flavors

I met Deb at Julie's Coffee and Tea Garden for a writing session. She wrote. I ate two rosemary-cardamom cookies shaped like teapots and drank a glass of lavender-flavored lemonade. I don't seem to be into writing these days except for this blog. I people-watched instead.

Two guys entered the cafe separately, but you could tell they were together by their fashion sense. One had purple hair; the other an unnatural red. Both wore pink shirts, flowered vests and striped pants in hues of lavender and mauve. They looked like characters from Tim Burton's 3D version of Alice in Wonderland. Then a bevy of girls arrived, wearing violet clothes that matched their maroon hair. "It's very fifties," Deb said of their thrift town outfits. "Surreal fifties," I answered.

The fashion parade was interesting in that the young people weren't Third Generation Hippies, Goth/ Vampires or Tattooed Babes in Scanty Clothes, which is what I usually see around here. Their styles actually matched the decor of the tea garden itself with its quaint pink and blue teapots lined up on long wooden shelves. Had I licked one of the purple-haired guys, I'm sure he would have tasted like lavender lemonade. The girls, of course, came in assorted flavors.

Minuet

Bob and I met Deb at our gym's swimming pool. She swam up and down one lane while we walked up and down the other. Occasionally she stopped swimming to talk with us or to bounce up and down, walk backwards or practice kicking. Bob performed various exercises with a pair of blue foam devices. Sometimes he held them in front of his chest, sometimes he pushed them down in the water and at one point he crossed his arms to execute some complicated move that involved a plunge between his knees. It's like he was inventing fancy dance steps. As for me, I just walked serenely up and down the lane. (I never try new routes while driving, either.) I walked for thirty minutes. I always expect this routine to get boring, but it never does. On the contrary, I gradually fall into an aquatic trance, soothed by the feel of water swirling against my limbs. After a while, I felt like the three of us were doing a dance, a stately minuet enclosed in a calm blue envelope of suspended time.

The Earth is Humming

Blessed with blue skies and sun, we had a lovely day here in the East Bay; pleasantly warm, but not too hot. I spent the afternoon doing art with Christina at her dining room table. We spread out our art supplies and then had a happy time cutting and pasting stuff in our journals. Her dogs spread out, too. Nina took a nap by the glass door that slides out to the deck while Gigi slept on the deck's wooden boards, her brown fur dappled by sunlight.

Christina has a deep box filled with art stuff, some of which she passed on to me. I pasted a pair of legs in high-heeled shoes onto one of my pages. Immediately, she dug out two more pictures of high-heeled women from her magic box and donated them to my image pile. Flapper women, Eiffel Towers, a strip of white paper cut in geometric patterns; all were generously provided by Christina. "I'm trying to get rid of stuff," she explained, "so that new stuff can flow in." She created a red/hot pink/pink page and a green/gold/dreamy page, both quite romantic in tone. "You only come across this shade of pink in French magazines," she observed, thoughtfully. "I don't know why."

I created a page filled with dark moody images. It was kind of post-punk retro-fifties in tone, if you know what I mean. (I'm not sure I know what I mean.) Anyhow, it was fun. I've composed much of my art journal with stuff donated from other people. Last year, Chris bequeathed his seemingly bottomless box of collage material to our art group. I found a card in it that I pasted almost unaltered in my book, art thief that I am. I only added a golden butterfly and the words "The Earth is Humming" -- an appropriate title for my light and joyous day.

Ennui

I try to blog everyday, but some days it's not possible so don't worry if a few days go by sans blog -- like the last few, for instance. Those were filled with gloomy weather and a visit to the dentist, not exactly an earth-shaking event. I was tired and bored. I didn't have any good books to read and there was nothing worth watching on TV. I was reduced to watching a few episodes of "Poldark" on the Netflix Instant watch thing.  "Poldark" is a BBC series produced in 1976 about a British soldier returning home after fighting in the American Revolutionary War. It's a 27 episode soap opera. I gave up after Episode 3 when I realized that it was going to become generational. As much as I love watching people in curly white wigs riding along sea cliffs on their trusty steeds or hanging out in dens of iniquity at the baccarat table, I can't stand generational sagas.

Let's see -- what were the spots of cheer in my gloom-filled last few days? Well, after I went to the dentist, I bought a clay pot at one of the upscale thrift stores on Fillmore Street. I intend to cook a chicken in it, but I'm not sure how to go about it. I'm told you have to soak the pot in water first and put it in a cold oven before you increase the temperature, else it will crack.

My other bright spot was reading The London Review of Books. I love to read about British politics since I have very little understanding of them. It's like cracking code. This time I read about the SNP. I bet you don't know what that is, either. Well, let me enlighten you. It's the Scottish National Party and they won big time in Britain's last election. I gleaned that much from the article. It was thrilling to discover references to Labour, Socialists and Communists as if those groups were still taken seriously over there (unlike here where "slight right of center" has become the new definition of left-wing crackpot) though since Blair's disgrace and the Recession, the Tories are presently in power.

Stars and Stripes Forever

Rain in June is quite rare here in the Bay Area, but it rained all day so Bob and I stayed inside, moored to our computers. The highpoint of our day was when he showed me some film footage that someone had posted on Facebook of his old neighborhood in Cleveland: the 1959 Fourth of July parade. There was Bob was at age sixteen, a beanpole teen in an Uncle Sam suit; stars and stripes plus a stovepipe hat. As others in the parade marched by on the faded celluloid, the scene evoked memories of a bygone era: adults dressed as pilgrims, pioneers and patriots, small children costumed as Indians or cowboys, even smaller children encased in white boxes with dots (sets of dice), old men and women garbed in Revolutionary War costumes, flappers with long strings of beads dangling down their glittering chests, a formation of men in kilts with bagpipes, a troupe of cub scouts and last but not least, the Lewis and Clark expedition with Bob's kid brother Ralph clothed in frontier garb.

Mothers watched, wearing pleated dresses, plaid shorts or pedal pushers and sneakers. Chryslers and Ramblers drove by and American flags were waved while someone held up a sign that protested imported cars and championed Detroit-made vehicles. I was struck by the strong community spirit, by the absence of cell phones and by the homemade look of the gathering. All of the costumes looked as if they were sewn by Mother's loving hand. Some of them were makeshift, but many were quite elaborate. It looked like a lot of care and work had gone into their creation. It was moving to see that more innocent America, the prosperous one filled with community spirit and pride of country, compared to the broken model we have today.

Of course, there were a few absences in the American dream: I saw no black people, no Hispanic people and no openly gay people in the crowd. Neither did I see any obese people. There were a few plump toddlers and some of the mothers were a bit too snug in their shorts while the older men had slight potbellies, but none possessed the gargantuan girth that has become a fairly ordinary sight these days.

Quest for a Swimsuit

Bob left his swimming trunks at the gym. They disappeared from the locker room so he had to buy another pair. We thought that would be simple, but it wasn't. First we went to Sears. No men's swimming trunks there. We were astonished. None at Kohl's, either, and certainly none at Walgreen's, though they did sell some strange-looking mesh undershorts. We found a rack at Ross Dress for Less, but they were weird -- sort of rapper/surfer trunks, baggy shorts that ballooned down to the knees in wild patterns and colors. One could picture an adolescent boy wearing them hanging down his ass or maybe a surfer guy at Malibu -- young and crazy guys, not old and sedate. We finally went to a sports store where he bought a pair of utilitarian Speedo trunks. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) they fit so snugly that they were even more outrageous -- in an understated Cary Grant sort of way.

Dare to Tear

What with no one telling me until the last minute whether they'd be here or not, our monthly collage party started off on an uncertain note. In the end, everyone did show up except for Katherine whose telephone was out of order. Without her over-the-top energy, our group was more subdued than usual; outwardly, that is.

I don't know why I bother to call it a collage party since no one's been doing much collage lately. Our collective energy has taken a turn into various Other Things. Christina worked on one of her art journals while I, following her example, bravely continued to work on mine, though I felt uninspired. Bob wasn't feeling well (allergies). He started a collage, but soon gave it up to lie down on the couch. Chris and Barbara furiously painted and pasted on Chris's curved wooden boards. I painted, too, covering my book with black acrylic. Bone Black. My favorite shade. So dark. So smooth.

Barbara brought some paintings she'd done, wonderful wildly-layered abstracts. She began tearing them apart, distributing pieces generously around to all of us. "I love tearing paper," she announced, gleefully.

"So do I!" Christina exclaimed. I used some of the torn bits as backgrounds for my stilted book. Fear of not making it perfect; that's my problem, but her layers of bright yellow paint set my pages on fire. I worked for hours after everyone else had gone: altering, cutting, pasting and painting.

I love the way we all borrow from each other; not only materials but also ways of working. We startle each other into life and warmth and before you know it, we've amazed ourselves with unexpected results.

Embracing Kudzu Vines From Outer Space

Suffering from insomnia, I spent most of the night working on a collage poem. I went back to my old habit of lifting material from The New Yorker's art museum and gallery pages. I arranged and re-arranged random phrases until daylight broke. I guess that's a better way of spending my time than tossing and turning in bed, but the finished product turned out to have a topsy-turvy quality:

I see you kissing the Great Whatsit,
embracing Kudzu vines from outer space as
if they were one cornucopian glory.
Voices and wind collapse.  Dreamlike, color
seeps in -- spare and spooky -- and time disintegrates
into loose springy webs -- notorious
and nimble -- a constellation
of shifting art and magic, a pinhole
of light in a darkened room. Time. Think of it as
a small-scale subversion that sheds its snakeskin
as you dive into your dreams and nightmares.

(The brilliant collage is by my friend Kim.)

Irreversible

I finally started work on my art journal. I made seven pages that I'm pleased with, but now I'm stuck. Part of the reason I like them is that I used my friend Christina's cast-off prints as backgrounds. Technically, it wasn't art theft since she donated them to me, but they were not my own. I sort of made them my own by embellishing them with a few things, mostly cut-out words. That was fun, but now I'm going through performance anxiety. I'm afraid that the next few pages won't be as good as the first. Christina says, "Don't worry about it. The book will be what it wants to be," but I am worried. What if I make some IRREVERSIBLE mistake?