I’m getting over this flu, but my brain still doesn’t seem to be working right. I feel like I blew a fuse up there or something. Benny says that on Monday night (I think it was Monday night) I seemed to be having a really bad nightmare because I was whining, “Pacoima… Pacoimaaaa…!” while thrashing around. Maybe that dream is what blew the fuse in my brain. All I know is it’s not working right, right now…
Why hello, bear. It’s good to see you. You know, when you got replaced by a new security gate on Glendale Boulevard, and then your friend the art aficionado got tagged with some really unremarkable graffiti, I was worried that you had left Los Angeles or something. But now I see you only moved downtown.
And you brought a friend too. How about that?
Man, I can’t tell you the last time I saw an elephant in downtown Los Angeles. Actually, wait… I guess I can. September 16, 2006 was the last time I saw an elephant in downtown Los Angeles. Still, that was a long time ago. Welcome to Los Angeles, elephant!
I suppose that when you’re learning taxidermy, your first projects don’t look that great.
They’re embarrassing to have around the house with their craft store eyes and weird overbites; it’s like they’re mocking you at every turn. How are you going to get rid of them? You spent an awful lot of time on those R2D2 rats. It would be a shame to just throw them away. Hey, what about eBay?
Somewhere, someone is bound to need a good latex spider monkey. It’s worth a shot; Mom says you have to get it out of the house immediately.
Has it really been less than a year since Benny and I first met our friend G.E.T. via a sign he left on the LA River bike path? It seems like so much longer than that, somehow. We’ve had so many wonderful adventures with him and his cohorts already. Why, just this past weekend we:
and later on we:
Of course, things eventually devolved into:
but overall, I think we stayed focused on the higher task at hand. That task? Art, of course. Blackmail’s out of the picture, as none of us have any money to speak of. It’s ART, I tell you.
I’m hesitant to devote a post to anything in the “Barbie art” genre, as there are so few examples of the genre that are actually artistic and not just lazy references to childhood pop icons, but website Design Boom has found something by French artist Chloe Ruchon that has captured my eye – Barbie foosball:
They have a lot more pictures on their site, too. I guess the piece is still a little ham-handed if we dig into the Political Meaning of a male-dominated pub game juxtaposed with an ultrafeminine fashion doll, but let’s not do that; let’s just enjoy the object. I bet the dolls’ hair looks incredible flying around during gameplay.
Perhaps you’ve found them?
Okay, I guess they’re not really my marbles; they belong to John Bridges, as you might have surmised from the credit lines. These remind me of an essay by Truman Capote. I wish my marbles looked this good.
Lately I’ve been too busy at my job to update Fancy Notions until I get home, and this has been causing me some pain. I long for the days when I could spend my workday doing something fulfilling… something other than “work.” I have to remember to keep my nose to the grindstone, however. As a good friend said recently, “Keeping your job is the new promotion.” Yippee. Nothing motivates as much as the threat of imminent poverty and no health insurance.
Thankfully, artist David Fullarton’s installation for the Sisyphus Office exhibition in Houston is giving me some solace. Between his accurate depiction of mind-numbing hours with too many Post-Its, Alan Tanksley’s paperclip chandelier, and Angry Girlfriend’s Binder Clip Dress, I feel like people are finally putting office supplies to good use.
Wow. I just fell in love with a car, but its whereabouts and any further information about it seem to be eluding me. Ain’t that love for you?
You would think that with all those steampunk geeks running around these days with their coal-powered digital watches and distressed copper-and-oak underpants, there would be a flood of information online about something called a Borg-Warner Vintage Car of the Future, but no dice. Two guys total seem to have all the information I can find, and all their links to museums and festivals dedicated to the love of this car and its designer Rowland Emett seem to be dead.
A lot of Rowland Emett’s drawings strike me as photographs of the inside of my head, so I guess it’s not a surprise that I should love this car so much.
The latest information I found about The Car was that it had been restored in 1998 and was residing at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, but these days the Museum of Science and Industry seems to be more fascinated with Harry Potter than Rowland Emett, so it’s probably sitting ignored in a warehouse. Hmm. Maybe I can satisfy myself with a visit to the Ontario Science Centre to see some of Emett’s other creations. If not, I’m probably going to have to occupy myself building my own moon-probe lunacycle just to take my mind off The Car. Ah – l’amour, l’amour…
I live in a part of Los Angeles that used to have a substantial bear population that has since all but disappeared, so my recent wildlife sightings in the neighborhood have given me not a small amount of joy:
Initially they seemed pretty shy, but recently the bears have been opening up. They’re quite polite:
One has even moved into my neighborhood.
At first I thought that these new neighbors might be the solution to my recent earwig house-infestation problems, since I know bears like to eat grubs and things, but then I realized that it’s a little presumptuous of me to start thinking about what the new neighbors can do for me. Also, they seem to be busy with a lot of other hobbies. Like art appreciation.
Maybe I should just invite them over for a Memorial Day barbecue instead. They may be the only guests who don’t mind the earwigs that are sure to be in the potato salad.
UPDATE 5/26/09 – The polite bears on Glendale Blvd. are now gone (curse you, new metal rollup gates), but there is more information about the bears and their human creator on the Corralitas Red Car Property blog – following some other links will get you to more bears. Hooray – more bears please!
I just had another one of those moments – one of those moments when I find a few of my interests have come together in a fantastic package, and I’m amazed that I didn’t know about this fantastic package earlier. An example earlier this year of one of these moments was when I started hearing about Edward Gorey’s naughty etiquette book The Recently Deflowered Girl. I have loved Edward Gorey and naughty books and etiquette since I was a kid, so how was it that I never knew about this book until this year?
But anyway, I just had another one of those moments. I love Mad Magazine artist Don Martin. I inherited my parents’ pretty good ’50s-’60s jazz vinyl collection. I play trombone. Why was I not aware until just 30 minutes ago that Don Martin made album covers for Prestige Records?
Finding these moments makes me feel like I’m on the right path somehow. Do you ever have these moments?
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