Category: art

Discernment and experience

Posted on by Liz Henry

I was excited about Lightscape because I thought it was sort of an expansion of Entwined — a bunch of large glowing installations in the park. In past years Entwined has been so lovely, and I have enjoyed tooling around its space and especially the part where I get to observe little kids freely running around in the excitement of being out at night in a place where it’s safe to run around. The pieces are by local artists and the entire experience costs nothing.

Unfortunately Lightscape turned out to be the opposite of that. Huge lines, expensive tickets, narrow, crowded pathways and a linear, predetermined path. I was elbow to elbow in a herd of people with hacking wet coughs, shuffling slowly along the path while ushers in safety vests barked at us to keep moving. There was pointless music blaring that seemed mostly disconnected from the handful of main exhibits. The exhibits themselves were pretty, and I can’t tell how much I would have liked them if it were possible to contemplate and enjoy them freely. In any case they would have been much nicer if they weren’t space-limited photography stations connected by linear paths. In short it sucked, it felt “commercial” or corporate in the worst way, soulless, controlling, divorced from the beauty of the botanical gardens rather than enhancing it. Lightscape had all the charm of a security line at the airport or a maze invented by Temple Grandin to lead cattle into a slaughterhouse.

I also hate things like theme parks, in general. I have a sort of allergy. Ugh!!

There were food trucks and popcorn stands and cocktails and hot chocolate and don’t get me wrong, I like those things, but not when they are shoved in to every fifth of a mile of the claustrophobic trail with the roar of their generators fighting with the bad music (and worse amplifiers) of the exhibits.

How do people “enjoy” things like this? And people didn’t appear to be really enjoying it, to me, they were tense, unhappy, constantly scolding their children for behaving wrong or not appreciating whatever it was they were supposed to be appreciating.

The children would have had more fun if you handed them flashlights and turned them loose to run around a meadow and make up their own games.

Well, that’s what I think! Just so you know!

Brought to you by a child of the kindly 70s.

Art should be free, and it should be anarchic!

Going through Freddie’s books

Posted on by Liz Henry

When Quilter and I left Mary’s house I ended up with several large plastic bins of Freddie’s collages as well as some boxes of slightly mildewy books. Quilter pulled the stuff that looked like older, more rare or interesting anarchist and other political books along with first editions and old copies of feminist science fiction. There’s another box of zines and letters, mostly zines and books that have Freddie’s art on the cover or inside as illustrations. Mary has her enormous collection of vintage Tura glasses, mostly cat-eye style with amazing rhinestones, filigree, or other baroque ornamentation.

As I catalogued and tagged the political books I got a very interesting picture of Freddie’s intellectual history and context – her milieu – that has given me a deeper appreciation of her art. I wish I had known her better as a friend rather than a long time acquaintance. She is a bit older than I am and I developed a sense of her in the 70s as a young person, agitating for the rights of herself and her fellow high school students, being around the “Red and Black” crowd(s) in the midwest, then dropping into the Situationist ferment of Santa Cruz and Berkeley and the general Bay Area. I came across letters from people like John Zerzan, sending her zines, reprints of Freddy Perlman or Camatte booklets, all kinds of stuff that it will take me a while to untangle (and likely scan). Debord, Goldman, Marx, De Cleyre, Jo Freeman, Audre Lorde. Mass production, technology, sociological arguments about industrialization, ecology, sexuality & gender; revolutions, schisms within revolutionary organizations, all made their way into her work. Anarchist women, surrealists, bomb throwers, angry women of all kinds. Her typesetting and graphic design alongside her art underpinned several different intertwined scenes & zines.

I was reminded a little of the feeling I have whenever I visit Timmi Duchamp’s house and when I first saw her amazing library (heavy philosophy! Holy shit!) Like getting to see the cathedral of books as a ghostly structure around her work. These few boxes of Freddie’s books hand picked by Quilter felt like a dark and beautiful sea, with my tiny boat (my own understanding) tossed around by the waves.

Like poetry the point of art (like freddie’s) is sometimes to say what can’t be said a different way , or say it in a way that can’t be “read” in words by people who will never trace your particular pathway through the world of books and ideas. Freddie’s delicate flywheels and iron, tendrils of vines, weave around women who are tigers, who are fairies, framed by the way they are classical statues, like Galatea bursting with things she wants to say, laid carefully across pages of anthropological texts, the chalice and the blade. Dozens of complex textures mixed with doll heads, with flowers, in a kaleidosope or a mandala, like stained glass window frames or reflections in a fly’s eye.

I am pecking away at these scans with my nice CZUR high speed camera scanner and putting them in two places, one on my Flickr in an album which also contains stuff that isn’t scans of her original art, and then more permanently and I hope usefully on Wikimedia Commons, under the category Collages by Freddie Baer. They are CC-4.0-BY licensed as Freddie wished. So far, there are 54 high quality/ high resolution scans up on Wikimedia Commons — take a look! Or, you can page through this little Flickr embed to have a glimpse of all the Freddie related stuff in my Flickr set.

Freddie Baer memorial album

For many of these works we have not correlated the titles with the work, so my file names for them are intended to be temporary placeholders.

I was at a party at Lisa‘s house this week & got to hang out with so many lovely bookish people, most of them knew Freddie, often through SFF communities like Potlatch which went all up and down the West Coast for many years. A bunch of us who used to do the “Tom Purdue” Proust dinner parties are going to reconvene and read Middlemarch (with me and Patrick advocating a bit for Dream of Red Mansions… maybe next.) Karen & Mike, Debbie, and others (I was briefly in their apazine but couldn’t keep up). I love those folks and especially am always keen to hear anything that comes out of Janet Lafler’s mouth, love her keen critical eye & wit & perspective. From some of those connections we will gather up more of Freddie’s work to scan (even if from prints not originals) and probably can figure out more of the titles. The T-shirt of the month club work is going to be tough to identify & catalogue!

Quilter and I are going back together to make one more pass through Freddie’s books and papers, next week.

I wish I had known Freddie better before this, and I wish we’d known to help do all this kind of organizing, scanning, curation, etc. for her (if she would have even allowed it). She was not looking to make a profit off her art. Obviously! Deliberately! As a political and artistic choice and I respect that a lot and understand it. Freddie gave her art away, she let it be used for fundraisers or swag for things like alt.polycon, the Tiptree, Potlatch and other really vibrant amazing communities. She made her money not just by her day job as a print materials designer, but by thrifting and re-selling (another interesting and deliberate political choice!)

I feel very determined that those choices to be non-commercial in her approach should not mean her work is disrespected or forgotten. Like, yes I am doing this because I will basically do any kind of collaboration with Quilter (we are also going to unfuck the feministsf.org site, wiki, blog, etc. on this visit and go through her books among other things.) But i am doing it because I love Freddie’s work and the bits of her politics and thought that I do know.

Thinking suddenly of Lorine Neidecker pulled out of semi isolation by Corman, and of course who even reads Cid Corman these days (other than me).

It is sobering work. Like, it’s one feeling to be sad I didn’t know her better, but how much more everyone feels who had been close to her! It is painful.

All of this made me think about the mess my own work is in. Every holiday season I look at my poetry and my writing and try to pull some more of it together, make a new zine, or re-publish something from my back catalog for Kindle. But it is in wild disarray. I don’t k now where entire years or books of poems are, or I might have one or two copies of a book/booklet or some printouts in a binder from 30 years ago, but no longer can find the files of entire manuscripts. It always is upsetting to face the mess. This isn’t even considering the things in journals & notebooks that never made it to a more final typed form. As I worked on this over the last week, on and off, I kept finding ENTIRE MANUSCRIPTS that I’d forgotten about, scattered poems, translations, or essays that were published that I also forgot about.

I resolved to set aside a little more time for that work and am putting all the poems and translations that are a bit more “finished” (lol) into a database locally on my laptop, and also to send out poems (old or new) more regularly for publication. A little archival work on myself, I guess.

Some local poets (or some correspondents even) would be so nice. I should call up Artsen and figure out a time to hang and write or go meet up with him at Hotel Utah. The DCC open mic was also super promising and I should be going to the Queer Open Mic at Strut more often to meet people! Feels like I lost my “scene” so many times and it is time to rebuild & make connections.

The power of glue and wheatpaste

Posted on by Liz

I love to make paper maché piñatas and recently have been working on some cardboard and paper mache furniture. It is relaxing because it isn’t writing and isn’t a computer, hurrah! The furniture is a large cardboard box that my parents had been using as a patio table after moving into their new condo. My mom liked it because it is super light weight and the perfect height for her morning coffee. But guess what, someone complained to the HOA that it looked trashy!

Thus my giant plan to paper mache this 2 and a half foot square box. I added some extra cardboard inside for structural support, but unfortunately only along the edges. Now I wish I’d folded a piece zig-zag and taped it into the middle so the middle wouldn’t sag. Oh well! The two saggy sides just shouldn’t be the ones facing up and there are other flatter bits to be the surface of the table. To add a little extra smoothness I am going to experiment with a thin layer of drywall stuff (left over by our contractors). Then, sand it lightly by hand, then seal it with some spar varnish (against mice and damp), then spray paint, then probably I’ll do another layer of spar varnish.

If all goes well, it will look classy as fuck but we will know that inside, it’s still the same damn box!!

a box covered in wet newspaper on the grass surrounded by piles of supplies, flour and water

Meanwhile on the collage and decoupage front! I used to make collages for zines and flyers and have an old clippings file somewhere in the basement, but I thought I’d make a new one file and run a drop-in workshop at the SF Disability Cultural Center in a couple of weeks. I have a call out on the neighborhood free exchange group for magazines but in the meantime I cut up an old New Yorker that someone put into my little free library. and then figured I would write a little how-to for decoupaging. It may not be the 100% best way, but here is what I do!

The basic idea is you are going to make a collage, but are going to utterly saturate and cover it with tough clear glue, to form a durable coat on top.

Supplies to gather
* scissors
* glue – school or wood glue is ok but Mod Podge is great!
* paper (see below for tips on gathering paper)
* scrap newspaper or sheets of scrap paper (to protect your table)

Optional supplies that will make your life easier
* a glue stick
* a repositionable glue stick! (special !)
* an exacto knife
* Bandaids (hahahah oops)
* wax paper (very useful for putting under your object while gluing)
* a brush, small bits of sponge, a rag, a wet rag

1. Get some colorful or interesting bits of paper
This can be magazines, colored tissue paper, origami paper, wrapping paper, newsprint, napkins, concert programs, flyers, ticket stubs, or other ephemera. Anything is good. Thick glossy cardstock can even work. You can print things from the internet, or draw something yourself.

2. Get a file folder or envelope or two to hold your clippings.
This doesn’t have to be anything special. I like big flat mailer envelopes, which I save sometimes from mail I get, but you can also just grab one free at the post office. A manila folder or two will fit inside it! Or you can use smaller mailing envelopes or just a piece of paper folded in half to hold your clippings inside the big envelope.

3. Cut up your magazine(s)
Cut out anything colorful. A big advertisement may have areas of interesting color. I generally cut around the bits that have people and words, and snip out the scraps of plain colors or patterns. Words can be fun too but you really want to build up a variety of colors and shapes! Put it all in your clippings folder and envelope!

It took me maybe 10-15 minutes to cut everything nifty out of this New Yorker — and here it is:
a pile of small pieces of colorful paper clipped from a magazine, spread out on a manila folder

4. Start your layout
You might have a look at your clippings and the thing you are going to decorate, and pick out a few colors, patterns, or decide on some kind of theme. Then start with large pieces first, and add smaller pieces afterwards. You can tack paper down with a little bit of glue stick to start with.

I used some scrap printer paper underneath my project to avoid getting glue all over the table but then switched to wax paper so that my table-protecting layer wouldn’t stick to the project. Wax paper works really well (or parchment paper).

a plain white mailing envelope with a few bits of magazine ads glued on, surrounded by working supplies like glue and scissors

5. Saturate and cover with ModPodge!
Once you get a bunch of it done or have covered one surface, slap on your Mod Podge or other clear glue. If your paper is lightly tacked down, or is thick, then re-glue its underside. If it is already nicely attached or it’s very thin paper like from a magazine, slather the glue on top and let it soak through.

I actually use my fingers for this because I don’t mind being grubby and I like the sense of fine control and being able to smooth it all down. (Do wash your hands or clean them off on a damp rag after the glueing!) But you can also use a small bit of kitchen sponge (tear or cut it up ) or a bit of rag, or an actual paintbrush to apply the glue.

5. Let it dry completely
Don’t touch it while it’s drying or the color might come off onto your fingers!
After it is dry, you could add another layer of Mod Podge or glue if you like, or coat it with some other clear stuff. If you want it to be super tough and weatherproof, look into different kinds of top coats!

Or, you might need to flip it over (onto wax paper!) and decoupage or decorate the other side.

scissors, glue, wax paper, and an envelope covered in bits of paper

The actual decoupaging step for one side of this envelope was about 10 minutes. I decided to stick to a few colors and big pieces for the background and then slap a little crossword puzzle solution on top. (An unsolved puzzle design will go on the back of the envelope later!) I opened the flap of the envelope to cover it too, which meant putting wax paper inside the envelope was crucial so the flap wouldn’t stick to things it shouldn’t.

I like how it came out!

the finished small envelope, colorfully decorated, smooth and glossy

I may add a fastener to the flap, or leave it open and use it as a sticker pouch in my wheelchair side pocket.

Small envelopes like this are also great if you decorate the “open” side and then glue the “front” side (undecorated) into the back cover of a journal or blank notebook for a nice little pocket.

Thoughts on disability representation and images

Posted on by Liz Henry

I was thinking this morning about the problems of making images that somehow represent concepts of “disability” in general, activism around disability justice and solidarity, or just wheelchair stuff.

You may recognize the problem. It is a challenge to find cool disability related stuff. If you want 9000 boring variations on the blue disability parking / bathroom symbol, great. But we need to go way beyond that!

In addition to running a nonprofit (Grassroots Open Assistive Tech) and creating logos and cover images for my small press zines, I love stickers and posters and all that stuff. In my backpack and in the side pocket of my powerchair, I carry a little pouch of stickers to give away to people. Some are for my own projects, some are random, some tech related, some fun cartoons or animals for kids. And I like to have cool queer, trans, and disability related stickers to share too!

To that end I regularly go trawling through Etsy doing keyword searches like “wheelchair + punk” and see what pops up. “Cripplepunk” is remarkably fruitful! I especially love the dynamic, queer coded pastel knuckle tattoo-ed manual chair “crip punk” sticker from ChaosCripples, and really want that on a tshirt or an iron on patch!

head on, fists forward, art on a sticker, of a wheelchair user with knuckle tattoos spelling crip punk

This one is nice too! “Mobility Aids Are Freedom” from SnailTrailStickers!

art on a sticker of a rollator, wheelchair, crutch and cane, that says Mobility Aids Are Freedom

If you go do some image searches for “wheelchair user” most of what you find will be kind of boring. “wheelchair user punk” used to bring up ALMOST NOTHING but lately, has been kind of good! Some kind of cultural shift (and maybe a technical shift as well) happened for that to be the case.

It’s not like we haven’t been around! Witness this pic of me from around 1993 taken by my sister! There was a version of this pic also photoshopped by her to make it look like the wheels are on fire. Note my amazing, youthful wheelchair-given triceps! Anyway I was a punk in a wheelchair and I would have really loved to see any kind of representation at all.
photo of young liz in a cambered sporty red quickie in 1993, leather hat and gloves, also huge muscles wow

My own drawing skills are OK but have a finicky, scritchy, lynda barryeqsue aesthetic that is not always what I want in a sticker. So I had a try at AI generating images a while back and came up with the seed of the Burn This Press logo I’ve been using on the back of some tiny zines. I lost the prompt but it was something like “nonbinary genderqueer punk, doing a wheelie in a modern dynamic sports wheelchair with electric sparks flying out” (developed over many iterations of bad prompts with bad results). I got something close to the current BTP logo which I then got my sister to re-drew a bit for clean up, and then I did more edits to mess with the hair, neck, lap, leg position, and so on.

Have a look at the Etsy and other online shops where people are making this kind of cool art! Buy their stuff and support them!

I surely have blogged before to lightly mock the wheelchair users we see in murals. They are in a terrible hospital chair, pushed by someone helpful, and everyone is looking up slightly with a beatific smile for maximum Inspo. Barf me out!

(edit: I can’t find that post, maybe it’s in draft somewhere, but here’s an example from the mural by where the J and N Muni trains stop at Church and Duboce. Note the ridiculously transcendent facial expression of this lady despite that she is riding the world’s crappiest wheelchair)

(further edit, i am only mildly cranky about this and like to make fun of things and it is a pet peeve, don’t get me wrong, i also appreciate ANY sort of representation for disabled folks and wheelchair users in particular, because it’s so damn rare)

(Also also, as the CEO of Digression, adding that I can wrench my mind from irritation that the one wheely person in this giant, pretty good and weird mural, is in a crappy chair being pushed, and direct it to the actually good fact that the care worker can also use a representational shout-out? though this is a struggle because what I personally want is a wheelchair user who “looks cool”)

detail from a mural showing a wheelchair user looking oddly ecstatic

Another problem with disability activism images is trying to represent as nebulous and huge of a concept of disability in one image. Using a wheelchair as this symbol is super lame! j/k!!!
This is how you end up with somewhat awkwardly drawn cartoon people where one is in a wheelchair, someone has a white cane, there’s an older person, somehow they try to work Deafness into it, they will be several different races, someone is in a sari and someone in a headscarf, and so on. Usually they are standing awkwardly around together as if posing for a stock photo! Maybe with protest signs if you are lucky but more often they aren’t doing anything other than Representing. I love this, and it is SO HARD TO DO in a way that looks good, and has some actual solidarity and joy in it rather than coming off as totally cheeseball!

(NOTE: I HAVE POSED FOR THIS PHOTO OFTEN – on request – feel free to put me in your pic – yes, if I work at your company or speak at your event, I absolutely will be in the front row or in your web site photo about Diversity – fuck yeah (but maybe with a little eyeroll))

I think these images, while lovely and well meaning and managing to do Representation, can come off as kind of bad art, or maybe we can be less snobby and call it folk art style, but I wish for artists who can draw the anatomy of human beings more competently than I can, to have at it on stickers, murals, tshirts, posters, logos, you name it. I want some cool socialist realist art of this Representation Group! Some art nouveau dandy versions ! Be in a park! Go to a music show! Be playing dungeons and dragons! Be doing something, omg.

Really the main problem is that none of these Group Photo Representation images, no matter how nice, work super well as logos as they are complicated and you have to draw a lot of bodies and faces and a background. When they are the best (to my mind) they become much more like narratives than logos! And that is good actually! That means they are MORE TRUE.

Here’s a pretty good one I found while writing this article from a report called “Resourcing Disability Justice: Our Feminist Journey Toward Centering Disability Justice“! These disabled people are having an ecstatic experience while feministly weaving together, and also representing some kind of super punk-ass rhizomatic concept, in space, on top of a damn rainbow! You see that it is trying to solve all the problems I describe in this single image. It is OVERCLOCKED. Really quite a challenge. Actually, my deep respect to everyone who has tried to meet this challenge, and a shout out to this artist, Abi Stevens!

(Note this report title is ALSO doing the most! “Toward” implies a proper humility, in that you are not done, or objective, or definitive, you are adding your little yawp to the collective chorus over time! We aren’t even defining or creating, we are Centering it. It’s also so disability justice that it has to say it TWICE.)

group of disabled women and girls in outer space, on a rainbow, weaving something collectively and joyfully

Another option is to have something kind of abstract – but what ?! I like ADAPT’s burst chain, in this category! There are many that are just like, a shape, or some shapes together, for maximum safety and boringness and when I see those I always imagine the ten painful committee meetings that produced them via painful hashing through everything else I just described. Thus, you may imagine me for years muttering “Oh, look, a SHAPE” and snorting to myself, whenever I encounter these logos, a mutter and snort that should be taken to convey the entire contents of this blog post, but 30 years of it.

For GOAT I worked both with poking some AI generators and also paying a friend who is a graphic designer to walk through a bunch of these concepts. Rather than human figures I thought it might be nice to have cute, colorful little icons of tech things. That way we get the variety of cross disability solidarity and the idea of tech stuff. The DIY vibe that I was going for is like the whole earth catalogue, sierra club how-to, 70s-ass hand drawn illustrations you might have in a step by step DIY instruction. So, my human designer drew me a whole set of icons, and I am combining and using them in different ways. There isn’t really a canonical “logo” yet but maybe one will evolve as I play with these images! I went with a tablet or ipad looking thing for AAC, a stylized ear with hearing aid and sound waves, and so on. The gear and tools, rather than the people.

colorful hand drawn icons of a powerchair, wrench and screwdriver crossed, spool of thread and needle, robot hand shaking a human hand

I was also going to say a word about stickers and patches and posters. They are usually very hand made and “folk art” feeling, they may or may not have “good” production values ie they may look a bit shitty or like they were created by raccoons in a back alley. That is fine actually. But what we want in our punk stickers etc. is a clear message that is legible to both our in group (other punks) and maybe to a lesser degree to our out groups (especially if we are telling them to fuck off). There’s a lot more I could say about that!

And the point of having these cool ass stickers to give to people is to bring joy to them unexpectedly – there is something so nice about, another disabled person complimenting my stickers a little bit wistfully and then I pull out a whole sheaf of stickers they can pick through & take! People really light up! Of course it is always interesting to see what they will choose when offered a wide selection! Bringing this tiny bit of happiness and crip joy to random strangers is also useful activism to do in daily practice.

BART Basel 2024

Posted on by Liz Henry

There were so many amazing scenes at BART Basel this year – Francois and the decaying golden banana, the woman with the woven toilet paper roll mobile sculpture, the trumpeter in Glen Park station – the piñatas – the guy with the fake butt – the fashionista with the beanie baby pug and bodyguards – Penelope, the girl with the spray bottle of water spraying her grandma’s raincoat – Too many to list!

At BART Basel, the crew sets up a pedestal with a glass cover, a red carpet, a backdrop, and a small but effective PA system and microphone. People come up to present their art; after 20 minutes or so the entire set-up and crowd gets onto the train to go to another station and hold another event!

a lady holding up a woven sculpture in a huge crowd in the train station

We started at Embarcadero, then moved to Civic Center, then to Glen Park, which is probably my favorite station architecture. The crowd was huge – and splendidly dressed!

I exhibited and read my short poem Take the 49, which is about the wrong transit system, so now I really need to write a poem about BART and read it on the bus.

liz holding up a tiny zine; another copy is in a glass case beside them

This year I made two tiny zines – Take the 49 and Copies, both under Burn This Press. They came out super cute!

two tiny colorful zines

a zine open to show a poem about the bus

The 49 poem does a lot in a small space. Late at night, that bus tends to go very fast down a major street that in the daytime is crowded and slow. I was going for the feeling of speed and joy, a little recklessness, the feeling of bumping over streets and pavements in bus but also in my wheelchair, being like those metal rolls in old music boxes, because often I’m coming home from a musical event at night on the bus, the music is still playing in my head, and i’m in a state where every sound of the city at night is like music & it all combines beautifully. One night a driver really did tell me a story about his old job painting the bridge and how at least the bus is warm – he was waxing a bit poetic about it all – and it was – as the kids say – “a mood”. While I don’t remember why we were chatting, we had a nice connection, but I don’t really remember what he looked like. I hope he sees the poem some day!

My outfit for BART Basel was in BART colors, silver/white and blue. I had a moment where I showed a group of people my belt buckle and handmade train-track belt, and there was an audible collective gasp. Very gratifying!

a brass belt buckle shaped like the front of a bart train, on a blue belt

You can admire more photos of BART Basel in my Flickr album or in this larger collection of BART Basel photos by many people!

And, if you love transit systems so much that you want to read a ridiculous, sweet story about BART and SFO as cozy roommates, here’s a link to Next Stop, San Francisco, which I wrote in response to the tweets from SFO and BART’s accounts during the protests against anti-immigrant/ anti-muslim ban policies in 2017.

The event was so much fun. I loved seeing everyone’s art, or (in)significant objects framed as art, and the joy of the crowd, who were in “eclectic dress” as described on the invitation.

Its organizer, Danielle Baskin, has done so many hilarious cool projects over the years. I appreciate her and the whole crew who made BART Basel a thing – not just a thing, but a tradition!

Legion of Honor 100th anniversary festival

Posted on by Liz Henry

There was so much cake! A marching band! Sketching in the galleries! Ballerinas and an organ player! Printmaking and free art stuff and activities in a sort of swirling all day chaos. I spent all day at the Legion of Honor and had a great time.

a ballerina in mid step in a marble hall art gallery with marble rodin statues

It was heartening to show off this gorgeous corner of San Francisco and a day of amazing culture to my parents, who have moved here from Texas! My sister and I hauled them around the museum  – we went through the Mary Cassatt special exhibit and both gift shops – and to the lawn where we had our sandwiches and cookies we brought from home & then attacked the aftermath of the Cake Picnic.

I hadn’t realized that to get into the Cake Picnic proper, you had to bring an entire cake! Per person! (or maybe a small group?) I have to share photos of the before and after. There were hundreds of different cakes. After the main crew of cake-bringers were done, they unleashed the rest of us onto the remains strewn across the labyrinth of long tables covered in white tablecloths. The mess of plundered cake plates looked almost as beautiful and colorful as the “before” tables. dozens of differentcakes on tables on a lawn

My favorite thing about this was watching people wander through the devastation and the emotions playing across their faces. First, being overwhelmed and confused  – then desire, even greed and lust, warring with a sense of the forbidden – and the moment of decision where people just said Oh fuck it and dove right into the smeary cake stands to get a glob of icing and crumbs. It was so beautiful.  That is how you know the cake picnic was art. It made people FEEL very intensely! The absurd abundance, the variety, the love and intent behind making something so delicious, unnecessary, and flamboyant – and the collectiveness of everyone bringing cakes!

a long table covered in the remains of many many different cakes. a man leans over and puts a finger into one in the distance

(There were forks over by the statue of El Cid, but by the time I realized that it was far too late for me, personally.)

We all laid on the lawn on my picnic blanket and my dad commented after a while that he hadn’t sat on grass for probably 20 years. “No fire ants here!”  Maybe he will warm to California!!!

I made prints from someone’s lovely art  – a poster of Alma Spreckels and another of a scene from the movie Vertigo – And got a free embroidered patch of the  statue of the Thinker – And then somehow a free magnet of the museum building which is now on my fridge.

a screen print of the legion of honor building with its many columns and an old fashioned car

The Mary Cassatt exhibit was great especially for seeing the parts showing her drypoint and aquatint process and experiments. I will be back to see that entire exhibit a few times!

Have a pic of my sister and I sticking our tongues out in excitement at our feelings of identifying with the lady reading a book:

liz and sister grinning, sticking out tongues cheerfully while liz points at famous Cassat painting of a lady with a book

It is always thrilling to see the real paintings of art that I have only seen in books or online before. You can get right up and see the brush strokes and the tiny lines of the canvas showing through which makes it seem so, almost holy, and real, and created, and I feel a shivery feeling of connection with people long dead!

(Though honestly when I think about it, which i often do, i also feel that way about every object i’m looking at, like, a random brick or whatever. Or – riding the bus past SF’s cute little houses – I look at the ornamental moldings or features of the houses, like the plaster shield things, and think about the decisions and aesthetic sense of the builders, carpenters, or house owners who might have wanted them.)

I had a good time trying to sketch in the upper gallery. It was set up so you could get a card to sketch on, printed with a border like a gold picture frame. You then could choose 5 pencils from their boxes sorted by color, and there were stools you could also borrow to sit on for sketching. Here is the painting I tried to copy,

rough sketch of lady in neck ruffle dressoil painting of a lady in a low cut dress with a huge neck ruffle

While I have never been able to really do faces and also never had any art classes I do love to draw and manage to do it expressively – there were some years where I drew comics and loved it but I was so slow at it that it was sometimes frustrating. Someday I’d like to take art classes and do a live drawing, contour drawing, all that kind of thing!   But words come more naturally to me and are my first love.

I tried to get one of the free wheelchair van Waymos, but none were around. My sister drove our parents back to the East Bay.  I ended up barrelling to Geary down the huge hill, which I love anyway — it is not like I go faster downhill in a powerchair, which limits my speed, but it feels extra joyous anyway on that particular hill and it’s a gorgeous landscape. I recall thinking, Huh a guy in a flat cap , looks a little like Horehound – but I raced past without even looking somehow and then we realized at the bus stop on Geary that we knew each other. It was nice riding the bus and chatting with Horehound (one of my favorite poets in the bay area – along with Steve Artnsen, Juba Kalamka, and Daphne Gottlieb, and Diamond Dave –  and some person named maybe “King” of indeterminate gender who read a brilliant poem about pouring milk into their cereal, while crouched on a stump in Holly Park earlier this year – and i’d like to meet more poets!!! I hope next year I will go to more open mics! )   A good end to a glorious day of connection with other people, strangers, my own family, and a fabulous poet acquaintance who I should go email right now so we can exchange information about various readings coming up.

Skibidi Megalon

Posted on by Liz

I went off to see Megalopolis excitedly knowing that a lot of people think it sucked, because even if it sucked I figured it would have some interesting thing to say about “the Future” and would also be something of a spectacle, part “neo Rome” and part art deco. But mostly, I am one of those people who often think about the Roman Empire! Danny, Mikayla and I escaped from the heat of this week at the Alamo Drafthouse, buckled up and ready for THE FUTURE.

It was ridiculous from the beginning. The signifying lesbians in the club (Girls licking each other performatively = Decadence!) The strange attempts to convey SCIENCE, the power hungry vamp, things that were like, vaguely Roman (?) And then the power to STOP TIME.

I complained to Danny that they did not lean in at all to the time stop power or any of the magic. “It’s because it’s meant to be ART – it’s like the power of ART!” OK fine…. it would be nice if the ART contained more artiness.

Aubrey Plaza leaned in hard to her part of the money and power hungry vamp “Wow Platinum” and I thought Adam Driver also did as good as could be done with his weird caricature of a Tortured Genius. They just played it as hard and cartoony as they could.

Things I liked: the trippy montages were embarrassing and pretty good at the same time. The dumb Megalon substance, never explained, that makes a beautiful 1920s World’s Fair park thing in the razed (and satellite-bombed) former slums. TBH I also liked the decadent performative-for-the-male-gaze lesbian gaggle. (I think it was Mikayla who pointed out that the first time they appeared it was like, oh they’re symbolizing decadent empire – but the 2nd and 3rd and 4th times you start thinking maybe Francis Ford Coppola just likes watching cute girls lick each other.)
The science startup montage in the office in the art deco skyscraper penthouse was so ridiculous it was good, at least at making me laugh, as they did a sort of trust exercise and spinned dramatically in spinny chairs while bouncing a basketball and unrolling scrolls on a drafting table. Maybe… maybe… the city planning aspect (while dumb as hell) kind of connects to how Rome would do very deliberate city planning??!

Every time Adam Driver referred to his Nobel Prize (often holding it up in its little case!) was a riot.

Another good laugh – when Adam Driver is partying because he’s upset (I can’t remember why – because his mom is nuts maybe?) And Julia mutters into her bracelet/smartwatch: “10:17pm. Drunk AND high.” The Caesar/Driver being drunk AND high montage is so silly! I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what it’s like to be drunk AND high!!!!

Best, was when we got permission to laugh harder at the vestal virgin in her post-scandal, hellfire joan jett haircut & eyeliner phase. OMFG best scene of the whole movie.

I loved being in a theater with other people who were also bursting into laughter and kind of groaning during the Serious moments. It was irresistible to me during the last half of the movie to attribute everything to Marcus Aurelius. All the quotes made me kind of hit my head and groan. It was all so sophomoric! Even the things I kind of liked I also didn’t like! Or I thought they were badly done in some way.

BUT then I was thinking, well, it is not a “good movie” by what we expect to be happening in a good movie, or in its narrative style fitting what we think is good, but that doesn’t make it invalid artistically! No one is (now) telling Herman Melville to “show don’t tell” so maybe I can kind of treat these plonking philosophical bits and the entire speech from Hamlet as Melville-ish digressions. But did it achieve those digressive glories? No. Not quite enough for me.

Things that made me go hmmmmm:
– The basic horrible elitism and “great man” theory infusing it all.
– The mob scenes are all about “the people” being manipulated and used by a few unscrupulous elites. It chilled me to the bone to have “power to the people” be shown in that way by someone who was around for the civil rights movement. It felt deeply racist and also like a racist dog whistle. We can see it as FFC’s commentary on Rome I guess. But none of the Rome stuff went that deep. “The people” don’t have any agency or politics or thoughts or even art (the whole fucking theme of the movie presumably, “Art”)
– None of our (in the U.S.) actual cultural connection to Rome and the various myths of Rome were really touched on. Coppola’s take on Rome and Caesar and everything felt like it came from having read some very outdated historian’s fusty 1890s perspective on the OG sources.
– The hideous sexism. Does anyone go, hey, does Julia also have this magic time stop power since she sees you do it and sees through it? No. no one asks. She is just there to be a muse and to BELIEVE IN HER MAN, who is a GENIUS.
– The more hideous sexism of the mayor being like “can’t you just be daddy’s little girl?” and trying to cockblock her whole relationship
– His original animosity towards Caesar/Driver very much unexplained. Why did he hide his dead wife’s body etc? What??
– Though I guess Julia does have the power with her one year of medical school to surgically reconstruct an entire eyeball and brain and face with Megalon ™. (But maybe just by girlishly Believing. Unclear.)
– that bit at the end where they are entering the world’s fair ass looking park where apparently inventing shiny escalators has solved all world problems, but the same mob who was grimy and looking through a chain link and barbed wire fence a few moments ago is now dressed in their best holiday party gear. Are they stepping merrily into the world’s fair? no! they are looking UP at the platform of famous pop star/politician elites step onto the shiny escalator in the sparsely populated theme park.
– just a nitpick, but if Adam Driver didn’t know his dead wife was preggers when she died, how?! since she was VERY pregnant including maybe an entire baby growing inside each enormous boob

I also thought, maybe this would have been a better movie if it had been made when he first thought of it! I don’t regret seeing it and I kind of like it better the further I get from being in the actual theater watching it and hitting my head groaning or shrieking with laughter. it did make an impression!

Maybe it wasn’t for ME… maybe it was for that 14 year old who is only starting to think about history and art, and looking for something to hook those thoughts on!

Well, anyway, I still love art deco curvey futurism.

But you don’t get to a place where the future is better and art is healing and the ecological interconnectedness of the Earth is respected, by looking to a Lone Genius Science Man to invent a magical substance that fixes everything and then having a bazillionaire donate a lot of money to fund it! And anyone sensible would know that because they would have thought about something that wasn’t the shallowest possible sophomoric Boomer-assed, Fountainhead-brainrotted, literary canon! They might have READ SOME SCIENCE FICTION which is literally a whole genre of people writing about the Future! Maybe even some feminist science fiction which deliberately writes about collective action, people’s relationships, people actually caring for each other day to day instead of giving an occasional speech about Love while totally forgetting birth control might exist, ETCETERA. The Earth / planet not even mentioned till the very last frame of the movie – I guess there were ecological problems (that weren’t fueled or caused by corporate/elite greed??????????????) that are all solved by MEGALON. Whew!

There is my review!

I definitely enjoyed the movie!

Weird SF and a kids’ book binge

Posted on by Liz

I did a lot of trying to say no to things and step down from things I wasn’t doing (well enough, or in some cases, at all) which was kind of my therapy homework and which was very difficult. Why is focusing so difficult? Why can’t we live 6 lives at once??? Why am I getting older and more tired? It just has to be.

More centrally (the therapy part I suppose) What if I didn’t feel like I was somehow failing all the time and disappointing people? I think last time I said this in semi-public a little group of my friends stared at me silently, looked around the table at each other and then one of them as spokesperson explained that when I said things like that with all the things I actually do manage to accomplish, I was insulting them. Like if I thought that harshly of myself, when I had a job, was in grad school, had a toddler, and was still also doing extra projects, then… how was I judging them? Years later I still think of this (thanks elaine) and how helpful it was at giving me a kick in the ass. (Not an instant fix obviously, but a useful insight)

Dealing lots with architects/contractors. There is some little thing every day and a bigger meeting once a week. Construction continues under our house. Someday, someday! we will live in that bit of house, it will all have wheelchair access, I will have a REAL BATH and soak and read in the tub, without the noise of power tools, and I will get to fix up the garden again to enjoy it.

Last week and this week, I’m focusing in on work for DIFxTech and on GOAT. I even got a little help from M. in discussing how to catalogue and tag some of the GOAT archive – how useful to have another librarian in the family! And both kids were here last week and are now back at school while Danny is in Europe till the end of the week.

Annoyingly I not only got a cold (not Covid thankfully) but also got my period for the 2nd time in the past year, resetting my menopause clock so I will still be officially “perimenopause” till at least next January. Mother of God, I was so fucking pissed, it was so great to have it over with, but no. Fuck!!

I took a sewing lesson in the Mission, making a striped velvet zippered throw pillow with fabric that reminded me of one of my grandmother’s couches that had similar colors and how I would lie on it and pet the velvet one way & then the other. Got my sewing machine out resolving to practice on it on some scraps but then realized the pedal was missing which led me to clean out the entire row of cabinets.

Will I actually learn to sew and finally complete the blue jean blanket of my dreams – modeled after that crazy quilt bed cover I slept under once in the 90s at Harry and Daffodil’s house, made of I think Daff’s former lover’s favorite jeans, with all the pockets and rips on top and the underneath soft with the texture of the inside-out frayed bits. It was comfy and comforting and so bittersweet to think of his love for this dead young man and all the ways the radical faerie & other community had come together & was grieving so hard. I have forgotten his name but not the love that whoever made the quilt had for him. I think he must have been an amazing person.

In reading this week and last:

Loved the Christopher Rowe books and short stories, tons of Weird Kentucky, the wonderful Navigating Fox, and I hope maybe there could be more about the detective dog. (Maybe a prequel so we also get the crow friend?)

I also loved Tuf Voyaging, which somehow I have never read. It’s a great read that comes off like light space opera, but which is actually kind of a complicated moral fable. The Portmaster was so interesting – like Martin trying to write in a super valid critique of his too powerful main character and what power does to him – I am always saying this so I warmed to it. It was like seeing him in dialogue with the ghostly hand of feminist science fiction, so I enjoyed that. Plus of course I warmed to the (too powerful) nerd hero and his cats and his (too powerful) spacecraft (as the youth say, he is “a bit acoustic” in a charming way.) Having the down to earth feministsf Portmaster tell him off repeatedly did not stop the OP MC one bit. But she wasn’t treated badly in the story, and she gets some kittens, and she had her own problematic behaviors; I liked how Martin treated her as a character.

Damiano by R.A. MacAvoy. Readble but not my favorite, a little too fetishy of a certain type of anguished christian man that just annoys me. I did like the witch Sara from Fennland for a moment, and then didn’t again (bad boyfriend, whinges too much about age) I also don’t think much of Damiano. Oops I accidentally slaughtered more people with my magic ™ waah waah oh my little doggie is so pure oh also my literal angel who i definitely don’t lust after, wahh wahh but also women are purty. Goth cosplay and a broken lute! The end. (Sorry everyone.)

Very, very, very annoyed by Rome of One’s Own, which I feared was going to annoy me. I had some hope it might be a nice overview, since “forgotten” women of history of basically anywhere and when is one of my very favorite things to read. Maybe I would learn something about women of ancient Rome. BUT NO. It’s so, so bad y’all. The most annoying kind of “history” book.

I want to just blast it with my scorn for a moment but let me set a background first. At best, the book is trying to explain that historical interpretation can change over time. But it fails to make that clear and usually ignores the historical context of it sources. Instead it messily conflates truth, what the authors of those sources (Livy, Ovid, or whoever) thought was true, what later generations thought, or may have thought, was true and how they interpreted a story about a particular woman, and then what the book’s author and apparently, her (British, women) readers will read into that story. Often kind of (and only kind of!) attributing agency, empowerment, or historical importance to the woman in the story.

If you want an example of this done incredibly well, I love how Margaret Reynolds approaches it in The Sappho Companion.

Rome of One’s Own did not do it well. It was like I was nonconsensually shunted into a wine o’clock mumsnet party who were all incoherently yelling “You go, girl!”

Please just go read some primary sources! OMFG!

There could have been a fine book here that clearly outlined, here’s some things that particular writers said about particular women who may or may not have been semi-mythical, and exactly when that was, and what else was going on, and then, what other people in England/Great Britain then said about those women in subsequent centuries and how they reinterpreted things in their own context! And then you could add your own Liberated Ladies perspective onto that but make it clear what you are DOING. you could write a popular audience history book that lays some coherent groundwork and is still readable!

And, only talking about what Livy and Ovid and like 3 other dudes said about some mythical women of Rome’s founding, does a huge disservice to all the cool history of regular people and women’s daily lives that we can look at from the past… century that puts it into actual context including with archeological sources!

Here is where I should recommend something better as an antidote and I do have examples but the first thing that comes to mind is Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s “Women’s Work” and of course Prehistoric Textiles. (Way too broad in scope, not actually Rome, but gives you actual information! that! is! organized!)

I then bounced hard off a detective thriller, Zero Day. It started OK promising a married pen testing duo and a competent hacker heroine and then went quickly to some places I did not want to go: a background of what sounds like violent/life threatening/maybe rapey abuse by her cop ex boyfriend, and her nice hacker husband murdered by chapter 2. I can’t read that shit while D. is out of town! Fuck no!

Not to mention, after the murder, she gets a mysterious email saying that there is a mysterious 1 million dollar life insurance policy and she CLICKS THE PDF IN THE EMAIL.

Nope nope nope! Must we?! NOT going to finish that one. If there is a less violent novel by Ruth Ware, with less dwelling on women’s fear, trauma, and fucking up, please let me know.

To clear my mind of all that, I went on a Project Gutenberg spree and downloaded a lot of dumb Angela Brazil books (The Jolliest Term on Record; Madcap of the School), an equally ridiculous Cherry Ames book, and Clematis by Bertha Browning Cobb which is a lovely book about a neglected orphan and her beloved kitten. And some things off the 19th century list of classic kids’ books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_children%27s_classic_books that I haven’t read.

So in short, BRB, gonna play some jolly field hockey with my chums and then go back to my digs for tea and spiffing rock cake (wtf is that, i’m still not sure but it does not sound nice). Why is diggings, or digs, school slang for where you live? mining and miners? archaeology? something else?)

Awesome Foundation Disability, 69th winner

Posted on by Liz

The 69th winner of the Awesome Foundation Disability grant is Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn with the project SPANKBOX!

NICE!!

SPANKBOX is a photographic installation that depicts individuals with physical disabilities in hypersexualized poses and situations. SPANKBOX puts the power back in the hands of those with physical disabilities by granting the audience permission to look, fantasize, and question disability and sexuality in a safe environment. It also allows people to see themselves for who they really are by answering the questions presented by those whose images hang in the SPANKBOX gallery.

And the part I really love is, after the question period of the exhibit:

During the performance portion of the installation, audience members will have their words read back to them to assist the viewer with realizing their internalized prejudices and exclusionary practices.

Both celebratory and confrontational! I’m so curious how this will go! And I hope the travelling exhibition will make its way to San Francisco! They have a further fundraiser going to help with future touring.

Hard to believe it’s been five years of Awesome Foundation Disability. I have learned a lot from reading the grant proposals every month. I hope that these microgrants with a low barrier to entry help change the lives and give all these creators, inventors, teachers, artists, and others a real boost!