Ordinary Beauty

Finally, using my talents for good!

One entire week into “retirement” and now scrambling to get ready for The Inevitable Event next Saturday. This is the party we decided to host annually after we had such a great time at our wedding last year. Drop me a comment with your email address if you didn’t receive the Evite (a whole lot of folks got theirs stuck in a spam filter or something so perhaps that’s where yours is??).

The backdrop I am painting is for the entrance to the party. Quite welcoming, eh?

Sometimes it’s easy to say I Love You — in this case, my beau is partial to Reese’s peanut butter cups, and something about the special Valentine’s rendition is even more appealing to him than the usuals. So, I’ve squirreled away a few to stuff in his jacket pockets now and then (shhh. Don’t tell him there are more hidden somewhere ;-)

The Stellar’s Jays are greedy. Can we think of greedy without ascribing judgment? Of course the Jays are greedy, they are tying to feed themselves. But they are so obvious in their greed and the loss it brings them.

When there are multiple peanuts they will take their time to make a “wise” selection, taking each peanut into their beak and weighing it, then dropping it to try the next one, until they have the optimal ones. Certainly, when there is competition around–other Jays or the squirrels or crows–the Jays will just dive and swoop on one peanut, and straight-away fly to a tree branch to feast.

This morning there are three or four Jays here having breakfast on the peanuts I toss out. One has swooped and grabbed and now is perched in the cherry tree with his peanut sitting on the branch; next he will start pecking at the shell until the nut is naked. When I toss the next peanut on the ground, the Jay can’t resist and leaves his perch to swoop on another peanut. And about the same moment that he scores on that nut, another Jay has swooped on the one he’d left on the branch.

By now you probably know that I am hot for the circus. Always, circus without animals, but otherwise, I’m in love with circus.

I dabbled for awhile in aerials, under the tutelage of Lara Paxton, one of the founders of Circus Contraption. Today I read an article that interviews Lara, and now I understand some of my circus affection.

Among other things, Lara says, “Circus also has an undeniable sexiness about it. And it’s a very immediate kind of sexiness, very alive. It’s not the airbrushed, anorexic, unattainable appeal presented in popular media. You can look at almost anyone performing in a renegade circus and think, ‘wow, I bet they’d be really fun to fuck.’ ”

hmmm.

My future new home. And me, in it. A little uncertain, I must admit.

photo: Heather Wofford

Whoa. All of a-sudden, I’ve seven Evites awaiting me. What a swell party girl I am. (Okay, so two of those Evites are for events I am hosting, but, whatever.)

I will be at The Beach for the Fourth. “The Beach” is my friends/family’s place on Camano Island, the spot we’ve been going to for summer holidays for more than twenty years. For us, the Fourth, is steeped in traditions, explosives are key.

A standard Fourth of July activity in our group is called Tank Wars, the gist of which is to amend a basic cardboard tank firework with other burnable elements–smoke bombs and snakes and firecrackers–and then aim your burly tank at the other burly tanks, and set the things on fire. It’s completely dumb, and very fun.

My eight-year-old nephews have more than $400.00 set aside for buying fireworks, money gleaned from extra chores and saved birthday gifts. The have already spent hours shopping the fireworks stands, assessing the selections, comparing prices, scheming the final display.

Their father, he has a reputation as a fire fiend (wonder where the children got their bent?). Dad’s youth included inventing ways to melt little green plastic army guys, but more spectacularly, launching his sister’s Barbies–burning–into the swimming pool.

My boyfriend, in his youth, would grind his own magnesium powder and craft incendiary devices–cinder blocks and fuses and rockets launched from the roof. He swears that’s all behind him. I doubt it. I believe that fire is elemental, and these boys are permeated with pyro proclivities.

It’s going to be a bangin’ Fourth.

Buzzy times in Seattle. Less than three weeks left to get your attire together and make that all-important first impression on the kinksters and scenesters who will gather at the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival, (SEAF) which opens to the public on Friday, March 24th.

The Friday night opening really is a swell party. Forget about being able to view the official art because the crowds will be too thick. Instead, succumb to the crowd, the costumes, the luscious surreal-ness of the Conworks space occupied by hundreds of genuinely delicious cavorting human forms. Revel in the smattering of over-the-top kinksters of questionable authenticity, for they serve as a foil to the other beauty.

However, you may be happy that the official art of the festival elludes your eyes. At least if you really were expecting “erotic” art. Sure, “erotic” is a realm like “pornographic”–we know it when we see it … but isn’t there something a little out of whack when each year, out of hundreds of pieces, I find one, two, maybe three which exude Erotic, and an abundance which just scream EgoKinkDebase.

I might think I need my head (and libido?) examined for this opinion, yet voices all about me opine in the same vein.

Will I be at SEAF this year? Of course. But this time I am bringing, and guerilla installing, my own art.

Oh. Did I say that outloud?

So, Michelle tells me, “I think I saw you in the new ‘Seattle Metropolitan’, that Brides of March thing.”
Weird. But I have worn the white wedding gown a couple of times for the traipse through Seattle streets to blissfully wed some phallic object or another in our landscape, so, it was entirely possible that my vestal-vixen-ish self was on the pages of this new Seattle mag.

Indeed, c’est moi.

Now I have to poke around and see what the scoop is for this year’s affair.

By the way, although I did wed the Space Needle and the Hammering Man (and some man named Tim), I am currently un-wed.

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So, my friend Ivan Cockrum who is pretty much THE instigator of the Seattle chapter of Brides of March, passed along to me this review in “The Stranger” of the new rag, “Seattle Metropolitan”. I have to concur with Mr. Constant’s assessment, although Met, as Constant dubs it, does somehow seem the perfect voice for all those faux Cool kids who get smashed in Fremont these days.