cycloid sally

I'm going to try spray fixative in a matte finish.
The Wheel of Things is almost done.
Harry told me to get him up for breakfast tomorrow and take him to the Universal. I think I'm supposed to pay. Well, he is an old guy with no visible means of support, so I guess it will not harm me to buy him breakfast at the Universal.
Tonight, Wednesday Wanderings again.

So this has been, as usual, a weird weekend. For once Hugo and Josh gave me the weekend off, and I took it, because I forgot that Chain's off biking with Mikey and I would be on my own. Which, when you think about it, is actually a good idea for me, since it meant I'd be undistracted and free to work all weekend long. So I was undistracted, and Saturday I got up really early, before light, to get a lot of work done, and I got into one of those moods where everything I touched seemed all gray and unappealing and I kept dropping things and crap. So I was unproductive and bored and eventually I took off with Monkey for the longest dog walk I've ever taken. I didn't just head for a park or something and I didn't use the leash, which seems kind of demeaning with a dog like Monkey.
After a while I kind of let Monkey do the leading, and we went all over the City. It seemed like we were going to all the reservoirs. I guess Monkey likes the smell of water. But I thought that was funny, because of the map that Monkey brought to Chain. Like he knew that was a water system map and he wanted to take this walk and check in with all his favorite places.
The reservoir system is pretty well designed, actually. They're all set up a little above the local street level, and they're about equidistant from each other -- not on a square grid, though, I looked at the map when we got back and they're radially symmetrical, kind of like a Wheel of Water, and that got me all charged up about the Wheel of Whatever again and I made a whole bunch of things for it. It's coming along, in spite of the fact that I never glue anything down because I'm afraid I'll have to rethink the Wheel or some of its parts or I'll decide I made a bunch of things wrong.
So I worked all morning Sunday on the Wheel -- we got home after dark on Saturday and I was exhausted and all I could do was read the map and drink tea. Chain buys weird tea, by the way, with sinister images on the fronts: this one has a dragon, but it doesn't look like the wise, beneficent Chinese kind, it looks like an agent of darkness wants to devour somebody. And there's a trick of the lines that if you look at it sideways and tilted in the light it looks like one of those paintings of Hell where all these naked people are flailing around in molten lead. I study it even though it gives me the creeps because if it was done on purpose it was a magnificent piece of work. Even though it's alarming. Chain likes alarming art.
And then, right in the middle of putting teats on a lioness, it hit me: what I need for the Book of Crinkly things is something like gesso to hold the ink off the fibers of the paper, but clear. So the brown of the paper shows through. Or maybe I could tint the gesso to the same brown as the paper. Because I can't imagine anything that's clear that would act like that but isn't glossy, and gloss is the last thing I need.
But by then Birdy's was closed. Stupid Sunday hours.
I wish I knew an animal behavior specialist who could explain this thing about Monkey and the reservoirs.

A nice day in the shop. I only had to work for about three hours but I ended up staying for longer because Hugo had this storyteller in who was reading books and telling stories to a little gaggle of kids from the neighborhood. Really nice. Mostly quest ones, which are always interesting. And really nice pictures.
There's something familiar about that man. I can't think of who he is, but I've at least met him before. He didn't seem to recognize me especially, but he didn't seem especially interested in me either. I didn't catch his name
Oh, and Monkey came to the shop with me. I didn't invite him, he just came. I guess he's decided he likes hanging out in the bookstore. He was really calm and grave when the children pet him and sniffed the storyteller all over, including a rather rude place, which the storyteller was gracious about.
Then I came home and arranged blobs of Fimo on the Wheel and when I couldn't stand that any more I worked on the Book of Crinkly Things. I've been testing printing methods. The brown paper bags are a little hard to work with but to my mind they are essential to the project, since nothing else crinkles just right.

11/10
Bella

That Harry Smith guy is a trial upon my life, I do swear. I got stuck with the Wednesday Wanderings again last night but honestly all I wanted to do was to get back to the house and make Fimo animals. I have a better idea about what the wheel of animals ought to be like, and it's like all I can think about for any amount of time, not even the Book of Cirnkly Things gets my attention for long.

So I took Chain's advice and I brought Monkey along and that was amusing. He seemed to think it was his personal job to inspect and pass on all the people who came to the shop. I swear he wasn't going to let a couple of them in, but Harry said it was okay! And then he gave me one of those looks. He keeps giving me those looks and I don't know if he wants to do one of those old men seduces the young women thing and he's trying to mesmerize me but I'm not falling for any Svengali number. Just give the damned talk, and let me sell the books and give out the tea and cookies.

Hugo came round for part of the evening this time. He approved of Monkey being there. It had me worried for a while, because most people don't trust dois in stores. But Monkey isn't just any dog. He's my bodyguard. Chain said so.

So most of the evening was just like the other one but all of a sudden Harry was going on about D'arcy Thompson. This weas odd, because I thought Harry was strictly into the metaphysical stuff, or at least his audience is, but D'Arcy Thompson is straight science as far as I know. Growth and form. Form follows function. Function follows form. Everything is beautiful because beauty is function and form and everything.

But he wasn't talking about beauty. He was talking about revelation. All of a sudden from nowhere he dragged out this huge poster I think he hand-did hnimself with fountain pen and colored inks. It was a geometric design, more or less, kind of organic in a way, kind of architectural in a way, symmetrical, incredibly detailed. I immediately wanted to make one myself. Especially when he began pointing to places on the design and saying stuff about the music of the spheres and the rhythm of the stars, like not hyperbole but as if there was something precise and telling about that. I don't know. I made a little sketch of a piece of it, and Harry looked me in the eyes and said, "Not yet you don't, kiddo."

Which was unnerving and I lost my place and the drawing I ended up making wasn't much like the thing I was trying to copy, and he seemed to notice that and take great satisfaction from it. One of those ones that Monkey hadn't really wanted to let in, a woman who was here last week, also gave me a look and raised her eyebrow at Harry. Who naturally smiled a really dirty smile back at her. I don't know why she didn't stomp out. I would have. Ick.

She's a pretty strange duck herself. She came and asked to look at my drawing afterwards and I showed it to her and she like critiqued it or something. What's that for? She seemed to think she knew what she was tlaking about but her suggestions were all "put a dot over here, probably," and "that line is too close to the other." Like she knows.

I know I sound like a cranky brat but I'm tired. And I won't see Chain hardly all weekend because I'm working hours and hours extra so the lover boys can go have a twenty-third honeymoon down the peninsula.

Guy Fawkes Day. I can almost remember what it's about. I wish we had bonfires and fireworks here. But it's something to do with religion, right? That would be a problem. Anything to do with religion gets a scary gloss here in the City. I gather they're more relaxed about it in England, at least nowadays, after having had wars and crap over it for a long time.

I must I must I must remember this. Chain and I went up to the Upper Santo Street Fair. Dog knows why they waited until now to have it. It could rain at any minute, though the lady at the shave ice booth said that in thirty-five years of having the street fair on the first weekend in November it's never rained once. (dog it was cold, why on earth did we even buy that thing? It hurts to eat shave ice on a cold day, just freaking hurts) Anyway, it was a fun fair with lots of artworks going on in it. This one guy had a table -- I don't know what it was for, but he had these rectangles of yellow varnished plywood about the size of a standard bathroom mirror -- four or five or so, maybe a frew more than that but not a lot. And the plywood was like those displays people used to make for science fairs and agricultural exhibitions and stuff but they weren't informative like a real one, they were strange and mysterious. The one he showed me had samples of materials -- every damned thing, a two-inch square of turquoise green carpeting, a hardened ribbon of red acrylic paint squirted out of a tube, a sparkplug, no sense at all. But get this. There was sense to it. There were about a hundred of these little metal cups nailed to the board, and there were samples in say maybe sixty of them, more than half anyway, and he showed me how the objects were ordered by color, by their place in the spectrum, which kept repeating over and over, and he hinted there was some pattern in the way the spectrum repeated itself but Chain was getting impatient and wanted to pull me over to the teriyaki wings table and I followed him, trying to figure out what the guy was trying to tell me about it.
Something about the next object -- its color and, what? material? shape? Provenance? Some moral aspect? and like he expected me to do something about it.
The next color was indigo. I got that. And what's scary is that the wheel of stacked animals is indigo. I think that weird guy knows I've been working on it and wants me to finish it. But that's crazy. I've never seen him before, so I hardly think he's ever seen me before. Most of the people who know me don't even know about the wheel of animals unless they read this journal. (and that's nobody but Chain and ritaxis, right?) And Chain doesn't pay attention to it except when I'm whining about it. The elephant stack that Monkey took away, and like that. And even then he doesn't pay much attention to it. It's just art and he has to pretend to be an utter philistine and not care about art at all in case he might happen to hate something I do and then he thinks he'd be in a tight spot. But it's not true. He's not required to like what I do. Got that, Chain? Nobody gives a shit whether you like my artwork, so you can stop pretending you don't know anything about art.

You know, just entertaining for a moment the idea that maybe that guy at the street fair had the slightest idea who I am and what my work is -- maybe he's one of Chain's bike messenger buddies, in which case why didn't they greet each other like they knew each other? -- but just entertaining that idea for a second, wouldn't it have made sense if any of the other materials samples had anything special to do with my work? But they didn't, as far as I could tell.

Oh, and I found one of the missing elephants in the lobby today.

Well, that was weird. I guess it was mainly unpleasant, but not very. Josh and Hugo pretty much abandoned me to do the gig on my own. I'll probably find double time in my paycheck or something but I didn't expect them to cut out like that.
I'll say this. Harry is an odd duck. He starts every conversation with this blank leer -- honestly I think he doesn't know what planet he's on and he's stalling for time so he can pick up clues before he gets into it. The old coots that came in to hear him talk weren't phased by any of it. They just nodded their heads when he talked and they asked questions that as far as I could tell had nothing to do with what he was talking about but that seemed to be all right because his answers seemed to have nothing to do with the questions they asked. And yet. They all seemed to think they were making sense.
Well, it was billed as "Wednesday Wanderings," and I suppose that's what it was, really. Wanderings through the mystical brains of Harry and his followers.
I have to admit I was kind of disappointed, because Hugo said Harry was going to talk about the pull of pattern, whatever that might be, and I thought that he would maybe just hit on this thing that's been happening to me lately but not, as far as I could figure.
He had quite a lot to say about paper airplanes and the rhythm patterns of disco and techno music.
I was down there till one o'clock, folding tables and sweeping up cookie crumbs. It's a good thing the store is only a few doors down from our partment, because if it had been any farther, I would have slept over. It was creepy out there!
I shouldn't have said that. Chain, you are simply not allowed to go all protective and knightly on me. You will not walk me home from the bookstore when I'm there late at night. Though next time I may bring Monkey.

In other news, I have a plan for the Book of Crinkly Things. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, only the choices of which pages to go to will be determined by a mathematical sequence. Why may necessitate numbering the pages out of sequence to get it all to work. I have other technical problems anyway so I won't be starting it too soon. I have to figure out how to run brown paper bag paper through the printer. Should I crinkle the paper before or after it has been printed on? And I have to decide aboiut text. Part of me wants a strong text presence, and poart of me thinks that's hokey and the visuals should speak for themselves.

I wish Monkey hadn't ditched that stack of elephants. I wish there had been lasagne left. How did it go so fast -- were there a jillion bike messengers in the apartment while I was listening to Harry? Or skanks?

It was a long night. Mission Street wasn't like this last year. It was like everybody's going away party plus the most raucous of wakes and New Year's Eve and somebody's naff idea about Hell on a shoestring independent movie set. And that was just the early part, when it was still mostly kids. Most of the time I had no idea what the kids were supposed to be.

(note to ritaxis, who's reading this, I know: yes, Chain was grumpy about it, especially after about two in the morning and he'd been woken up six times. He had to work today and he says he likes his beauty sleep. Pretty well futile if you ask me. I mean, he's a bike messenger, for dog's sake, where's the beauty?)

Since I couldn't sleep I worked a lot. I'd have finished the stacking animals one, too, if Monkey hadn't taken it into his little doggy head to remove several of the stacks and distribute the little plastic animals all over the apartment. And then -- this was really weird, he never does crap like this -- he took the elephant stack and ran out the door when I was dealing with some adolescent trick-or-treaters who apparently weren't after the candy so much as they were asserting their right to ask for it. Does that make sense? So there I was -- Chain was out there somewhere at that point, probably chatting up some skank -- door open, dog tearing down the hall and a bunch of teenagers wanting to banter. I yelled at them to get the dog and they tried but they failed, natch, Monkey can be pretty fast when he puts his little doggy legs on the job, and I had to go after him -- he got to the street, and into the crowd, taking evasive action the whole way. Monkey doesn't do shit like that. By the time I caught up with him, he'd lost the stack and was sporting a hot pink feather boa fragment and a big poufy marigold stuck in his collar and carrying a Slim Jim, you know one of those skinny dry sausages they sell in the plastic tube. I guess somebody thought he was a trick or treater.

And then -- the doors were locked and I didn't have my key. Or a phone to call Chain. Luckily for me that guy Harry was drifting in around then -- I think it was only ten or eleven by then -- and he opened the door for me. I was only standing there on the sidewalk, barefoot, with an unleashed dog in a feather boa and a flower, for maybe twenty minutes. But somebody gave me a gummy ghost lollipop and somebody else gave me a coupon for a two-egg breakfast, so it was not all lost.

Our own door locked when it closed behind me too, but Chain got home around then, not wasted but a little smug and smelling of that damned oxygen bar down at the yuppie end of the street. It must have been a skank: there's nothing else in this warped galaxy that would get Chain into such a yuppie establishment.

And so Chain tried to get some sleep and I tried to recreate my work until Chain went off to messenge and I crashed.

Tomorrow is the first of the Wednesday Wanderings that Harry's supposed to host. I have to work that night. I hope it's not too dreadful.