genevieve and dragon

i dreamed i was reunited with my cat, genevieve, last night. we were standing on a wood dock in the middle of a large lake filled with water lilies and koi. we sat on the dock and talked together, laughing. then evian's cat dragon came and started splashing and swimming around us. genevieve and i laughed at the fat orange cat pouncing at carp in the pond. dragon was crouching in the water, concentrating on some fish, so i reached out to touch his body and scare him, when suddenly the cat turned into a golden crocodile and snapped at me, waking me from my dream.

how doth the little crocodile
improve his shining tail,
and pour the waters of the nile
on every single scale!

sketchbook no. 4

i'd like to make rubbings of every grave in the long fir cemetery with a crayon and newsprint or butcher paper. then i could bind all the rubbings into a huge book, a catalogue of all the faces of the gravestones. this project would take forever. and after ten or twenty years, i could do it again as experiment in how much the weather and time have changed the graves. do you think i could get a grant from an historical society to sit around all summer in the graveyard and do this? do you think it would ever get creepy? i have been on the halloween tour of lone fir murders. scary.

sketchbook no. 3

i could keep a pad of tracing paper with me at all times and trace out designs and images and textures and patterns and anything else i thought was interesting. then i could put each week's worth of tracings together into a book, with pretty little signatures of blue thread and a study cover. i could make a book each week for a month, or for a year.

sketchbook no. 2

hey remember how i wanted to play a day long game of one in one hundred during which i take one hundred photos of men i think attractive? you don't? oh well, yeah. i want to wander around portland and whenever i see someone attractive, i'll take a portrait of that person.

now i'm thinking it could be fun to adapt this idea and turn it into a zine. once a week or once a month, i'll wander around with my camera, take a picture of all the attractive guys i see, then print them in a simple little zine with captions listing where i saw these men. it'll be like an about town magazine for portland except only the cutest guys will be in it. no words, no distractions. just men.

sunny skies in portland

does anyone else think that adam liptak, legal correspondent for the new york times, is sexy? 'cause wow, i do. that's my kind of guy!



let me tell you about the gorgeous weather the pacific north west saw this last weekend, especially since most of you sun belt folk weren't seeing any sun at all. don't worry, i took pictures.



yes, portland did look exactly like une dimanche apres-midi a l'ile de la grande-jatte. the entire city came out to bask in the warm sun, fight off the depression and anxiety they were beginning to feel due to the cold and gloom. down on the west promenade of the willamette, people were running and biking and roller-blading and laying in the grass and smoking weed. children were playing. people were laughing. there were smiles to go round like drinks being passed out by your favorite drunk.



booth and i walked down the west bank as well. we walked around looking at the trees beginning to bloom, the people milling about. "now she's a looker." "that's who i'd like to meet." and we walked through the pearl. and played frisbee. and i bought us some gelato (i had orange chocolate gelato).



and then we walked home and i made a beautiful, summery dinner for us: tilapia tacos with lime and avacado, served with rice cooked with lime juice, and zucchini spiced with cumin and garlic and chili powder. it was amazing. afterward, we watched a movie while the sun set, a big pink cloud hanging over our fatness.



and the next day was much the same. more frisbee. more walking. more happiness. a happiness we never wanted to end and were amazed was the result as something so light and invisible as sunlight, as the weather.

i can't even wait for summer. okay, maybe not summer because we don't have air conditioning in the apartment, but warmer, brighter days definitely.

now didn't those images just brighten your day? that's what adam liptak does for me.

pre-fizz

i went to the library today to read artforum. i sat across from a small mexican man reading a book called hombres amor y sexo. i went for a short run when i returned home, encountering a small dog without a collar on 20th. he seemed sweet and playful. he was smaller than my cat. i didn't take him home because a couple walked up behind me and they seemed interested in him.

this is a list of people and books that interested me while reading artforum and that i want to research more:
-dan graham, theatre
-and back again www.deitch.com
-matt green, pictures of women
-ataxia ii, michael gormley
-matthew barney, ancient evenings: a libretto
-martin kippenberger
-hollis frampton / stan brakhage / kenneth anger
-sergey dvortsevoy's tulpan
-dereck jarman
-rhys chatham / christina wolff / arthur russell
-harold pinter, art, truth and politics
-marcel l'herbier, l'argent
-barkley hendricks
-arthur zmijewski
-zhang huan
-santiago sierra

tonight i'm going to a sloe-gin fizz party a few blocks away. tristan sent me this video of lorreta lynn and jack black singing about portland, or and sloe-gin fizz.

remodeling health care

certain members of the democratic caucus within congress have taken up obama's mission to provide health care for all americans. as senators and congress people debate and brain storm how best to transform our health care system, a writer for the New York Times points out that, "[t]he industry went a step futher (after promising to accept all applicants regardless of illness) last week, offering to end the practice of charging higher premiums to sick people int eh individual insurance market." yet even this measure does not guarantee that health insurance would be afforable to all americans. "The government cannot require people to have insurance if they cannot afford it, so lawmakers must decide: who would get subsidies? How much? And if the government subsizes insurance, should it also prescribe the items and services that must be covered - the specific benefits or their overall value?" apparently, offering subsidies may be unnecessarily complex and ineffective. it would seem that government provided universal or 'socialist' coverage seems to be the only option then. therefore hillary's plan for government provided health insurance seems necessary. however, as the article later poitns out, the cost for putting together a remodeled health care system could cost by conservative estimates up to one trillion dollars over the next ten years. in light of this fact, a health care insurance system does already exist in america and it might make more pragmatic, that is culturally and historically american sense to utilize this pre-existing structure. the existing health insurance industry might cost less to restructure and could produce greater revenue, greater economic stimulation. however, a more socialist approach could be more efficient and has historical precedents for realization in several western nations. i don't know what i think now, except that a socialized system may not require as much trial.

question: am i actually doubting socialism?