You Can Be a Pillow Pal

I've been working on some fan club materials, and I woke up this morning with the idea to do a promotional video/infomercial so I would have more than one person to send them to. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. It reminds me, in the best possible way, of the class projects I used to do in middle school.

Don't you think Channing is the most photogenic and best boyfriend ever? I guess there's a slight chance you don't know who Channing is, so I'll go ahead and say that he's the Pillow fan in the video.

You should join the fan club. Email palsofpillows@gmail.com

-Fan Club President

boat and beaver

I finished that beaver puppet I was working on, and finally got around to taking a picture. 

Now I'm building a boat. It's almost finished, I just have to attach the mast and the sail at this point. Mr. Tusks was less helpful than usual on this project, which was great. 

Below is an experiment which involves me saving a bunch of trash, as do most of my experiments. Can you guess what it's for?

mail

I love mail. I get really excited to check the mailbox every day even though I almost never have any reason to be expecting anything. When something does come, besides a coupon for a store I never shop at, it's really wonderful. But I also love the other half of mail, which is making it for all of my lovely friends.

About six months ago, I started documenting the things I sent out, because I tend to spend a long time on them and then sometimes (hardly ever) they get lost, which is terrible. I also thought it would be fun (and useful) to keep track of what I sent to people, so I would know if sending more Garfield cartoons would be an annoyance or a delight. A lot of times I get too excited while making the mail and I seal up the envelope (usually I make the envelopes out of magazine pages for added fanciness) before I take a picture of the contents. Sometimes I even mail it without taking a picture of the envelope, so I sometimes get a message from someone saying "thanks for sending that thing" or "I'm such a bad friend, I totally owe you mail" and I've forgotten that I sent them anything at all. Not a perfect system, but at least now I remember SOME things I send out.

So I thought I would share a few pictures from my mail documentation project, to encourage you to send me something. (Just kidding. Sort of.) You can click on the photos to enlarge.






The tiny envelopes got put inside of a pinata with a bunch of other letters for a birthday present. In case any of you are wondering, my birthday is September 22nd. 

Guess how big the leek was!

This morning when I was brushing my teeth, the faucet broke. The water stayed on all day until the plumber came when I got off of work at 3:00. I read a newspaper article that said really obvious things about how bottled water is stupid, and I felt bad.

I really did get an enormous leek (plus a normal-sized leek) in the CSA box. It's as big as my arm, which is massive! We got rutabagas, too! I have never eaten one, so I'm pretty excited about that. Carrots=carrot cupcakes. We have been waiting two weeks for them because we were so busy that our last carrot bunch went soft before we could use them.

I went to the store and spent 40 cents on a lemon. Mr. Tusks followed me for two blocks when I went, until I scared him into the street. I was trying to scare him back toward the house, but I guess my scaring was too vague. Every time I go outside I feel like I have a thousand tiny cuts inside of my throat, because there are floral items in the air. I got some hate mail and some love mail. The love mail was way better.

I made a vaudeville beaver puppet last night while I was waiting to hear from my partner so I could work on my school project. I haven't added the teeth or eyes yet, but I think I will finish those parts tonight. I haven't settled on his costume yet.

While I was waiting (this was like 6 hours of waiting) I also mended those four garments he's leaning on, so now I will be able to wear them in polite society.

I do have ever so many appointments with polite people nowadays. For example, sometimes the bus driver is polite. Depends on which one you get.

Next week is spring break, which doesn't really mean much. Slightly less schoolwork, maybe.

Now I have to take a shower because I sprayed myself with hollandaise sauce when I was making it in the blender.

Here is a picture of a dogtor from the internet. He has hands just like the pig-faced lady:

This proves that 2009 is exactly like 1837.

Party Plannaz

Here is the video Channing and I made for this year's True/False party. As the description on the youtube page says: "When we were asked to make this video we knew it would either get lost and not be played, the projector would be missing a cable, or it would be projected through 15 layers of cut up clear trash bags upside down and backwards onto the floor. And we thought the "idea book" that Monica and Ogechi sent us was exploitative/not especially inspiring/featured the same ideas as the 2007 T/F "tribal rave" party. So we just made a video making fun of Monica and Ogechi and their idea book, and it was played through the garbage bags and no one saw it until now."



The party was really fun. Thanks to Monica and Ogechi for doing lots of work to make it happen.

I think we decided that this video was directed by me and edited by Channing. And I made the Casio-mashing score.

some reading materials

Work on my golden retriever movie project has slowed way down, hence less photos of cats wearing vests and giraffes in boats. But I have a good excuse, which is that I started library school. I have no idea if I already blogged about this, so I will just say that I'm really busy and it is really interesting. Today I went on a field trip to the archives of the California Academy of Sciences. We didn't get to see the rainforest, and it wasn't the "wet collection" (dead things in jars) but we got to see some books and maps from expeditions from 1568 or something like that, some of which featured beautiful engravings of whales and seals and birds. I'm not sure what area of library science I want to get into, but I'm leaning toward some sort of archivist position. I'm really into old stuff and looking at pictures, so I think that an archival career might just be for me.


Another thing getting in the way of me completing my masterpiece is the True/False Film Festival. Channing and I are in the process of editing a video that's going to play at the Friday night party. We'll be in Columbia for four days or something like that, so now I have to try to do lots of schoolwork in advance so I don't get behind. I don't know if we're actually going to see any movies. I told Channing to reserve tickets for the ones he wanted to see, and I think he forgot. I'm hoping to have a full schedule of hanging out with people I haven't seen in a long time and eating ice cream, so it doesn't really matter to me if I see any movies.

I did manage to make an ocean set for the golden retriever movie yesterday, but Mr. Tusks was trying to sit on it, so I had to put it on a high shelf before I got to photograph it. But it looks exactly like this:


Also, it is raining a lot, which is great because there is a drought.

Sometimes I Hate Art

The first Friday night of every month is a big art gallery open house time in Oakland. Of course, the galleries are all open at other times, but if you want to go and see other people who are going to galleries and talk to them or just not feel weird about being the only person standing in the gallery, the first Friday night of the month is the time for you to go.

We've lived in Oakland since August, and fully intended to go to this art murmur nonsense pretty much every month. But things always seem to come up, usually things like me wanting to go to bed at 6pm instead of going to art galleries. Yesterday we finally went and it was not great. Sometimes I get really enraged at art galleries. This time I just felt sickened. Rage and nausea at viewing art pretty much always comes from the same source for me: the art being crap. There was definitely some good stuff going on. The World's Smallest Post Office was there, for example. But the cool things were vastly overshadowed by tons of art that I felt like I'd seen before and wasn't impressed by the first 20 times.

As you may know, I used to paint a lot. I loved painting. And every painting I made was on the back of cardboard from whatever food box I had just emptied. I spent hours and hours on each elaborate piece of cardboard. When I was in Boston I worked as a model in art classes, and the instructors would always ask me if I was an artist, as most models tend to be. I could never describe the art that I made, so I started carrying some of my cardboard canvases with me and showing them to those who inquired. When I did show them to people, they were always impressed (or at least did a good job of acting that way) and every single one of them told me, in horrified tones, "you can't paint that on cardboard." Because it's not archival, which means all of my paintings are going to rot and the paint will fall off of them after a while. "Paint on canvas" they said, "and you could do really well with these." But I can't paint on canvas. It makes this scratching noise, and the lines are never smooth enough to satisfy my ocd. I can't paint on masonite, either, even though it's a smooth archival-quality surface, because it's too expensive. Even decent paper is too expensive. I kept painting for a while, but eventually I stopped, because thinking about the cardboards warping and rotting and the paint falling off got me discouraged.

So, basically, the feeling I got from the art galleries was "I wish I had money so I could buy masonite." But, more specifically, "I wish I had the money that these people who are doing a shitty job with their art supplies have."

Maybe after I get a real job I will take up painting again. I'm not sure, though. Right now I don't really even have any desire to paint. There are so many things that seem more exciting. So for now I'm going to continue making videos, because it's much cheaper (sort of) and they last forever no matter what shit you use to make them.

We got our own greenscreen last night, so now we can finish filming the golden retriever movie whenever we please.