Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the Uncategorized category.
These days
Difficult times. To get my blog happening again, went back and took out a lot of the stupid innocent happy things I wrote in the late ‘oughties, replacing w brief observations. A couple I left as is or only abridged.
Pacifica, CA
It was an unpleasant little suburb in the late 70s, where if one day in twenty the sun broke through…I’d have a guilt panic: what could I possibly do to celebrate this rarity and beauty adequately?
True Blood on TV
It’s my personal version of watching football, I guess, in the sense of being utterly useless and silly and bewitchingly fun vicarious involvement in events so far from our own real lives. In the same way as the football fans discuss the games—what coaches might do, relative skills of players—we discussed throughout the first season whether Sam could have killed vampire-friendly female Bon Temps citizens to frighten Sookie away from Bill, whether the Sheriff’s Department could have been covering up for one of their own, what Amy was REALLY after. But the brilliant twist of the whole series, books and HBO, is that in making the vampires the latest civil rights-vs.-bigotry flashpoint, they force the viewer to exist in a world where race and sexuality aren’t all that important. This can be very disturbing, e.g. when Sookie’s friend and coworker Lafayette, both gay and African American, confronts a high-profile politician with whom he’s had various extra-legal business dealings—because he’s outraged by the would-be senator’s anti-vampire stance, not his homophobia—and then proceeds to use the politician’s constituents’ racism to harm his electability by posing for a friendly photo. The choice of music and the swampy southern atmosphere of the show are also rather enchanting.
Peel cars
Check out the Peel cars from the Isle of Man, they’re tiny and pretty darn adorable and totally resemble the cars my brother Michael Botkin wrote about in a utopian fictional San Francisco story he wrote and I illustrated in an old issue of Processed World! ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mio5fTKqWgM ) I do think they could be a bit less underpowered, however.
Taboos Which Aren’t Anymore
Wear white after Labor Day! Wear whatever colors you like, when it pleases you.
A great tattoo!
Ripe tomatoes with the tomatoey goodness one can’t find in the store (this side of Santa Cruz, CA)…fresh catnip that our felines love…cilantro, parsley, rosemary, peppermint, cayenne peppers, the odd beautiful flower, chamomile, and soon-to-be pumpkins and watermelons! As Peter Bagge’s Buddy Bradley said of sex, “It’s so easy and fun!” Gotta start clipping lots of the herbs to dry since it’s August already.
Unable to work on much besides the “farm,” because my precious son is here, looking all buff and amazing thanks to his hard work lifting and exercising, and we’re doing a lot more of that here. He’s kindly and patiently taught me everything I forgot from high school gym class about basketball, and I’m having fun playing it with him; even if I still have a tendency to cover my head and squeal if I don’t know where the ball flew to, if I stand where he tells me to I make lots and lots and lots of baskets! We’re also hiking and stretching and lifting weights, it’s great.
Last weeked in this beeeeyyooootiful art house in Jersey City my most wonderful tattoo artiste Denise de la Cerda (www.chicksdigtattoos.com) did some lovely work on my right sleeve and I trimmed her dog, Tashi. Tashi-dog is like a smaller German Shepherd with the fur of a and size of cocker spaniel/sheltie and has the sweetest honeybrown eyes. Denise calls me Tashi’s biological mother cz when she was a tiny puppy being dumped on the JC pound, I happened to be volunteering the day we picked her and her littermates up. Damn, it was love, it was fate–she was Gabrielle for her 1st fifteen months, going to Hamilton Park in JC and Puppy Kindergarten at St. Hubert’s and playing with Berry all day all crazy; but Tashi means sump’m cool in Tibetan Buddhist, I forget what, so she’s Tashi now and she loves Mom Denise totally. She also behaves unbelievably way better for her than she used to for me–my spouse called her “the rocket without fins” when she was a puppy, but: she was a puppy, hello! So it was great to see her as well as the delightful Denise, even if Tash really didn’t like the trimmer. Biting at it, she reminded me of herself as a bitty pup biting at the hairdryer after her bath.
Angela Bocage 