Party at Paige's

Look who showed up in the Paige Powell photo/video exhibit at the Portland Art Museum:

 Look closer!

Our very own Quentin Crisp is in attendance!  Sorry the photo is blurry.  It was in a high-up spot on one of the walls where hundreds of photos are collaged.  I'm lucky I spotted this one.

I went to work after my last post and cleaned up my silly couch.  This photo is a bit of a fraud, because I tidied up for  a minute before I took it:

Dishes are mostly washed, laundry mostly done, season 2 of Hannibal mostly watched.  This is a TV show where every third person is a serial killer who turns each victim into a leisurely art project.  None of them seem to be concerned about making a swift getaway. 

Là-Bas

It's been about 90 days since the old Fitzrovians began and it's time to evaluate my headway.  As if I haven't been for weeks now.  Still, I've digressed a lot with the parts about my upstairs quarters and I'm going to focus on the basement for this entry.

I would grade myself A+ for thoroughness, A for creative solutions in allocation, B+ for speed and efficiency, B for aesthetics, B for cleanliness (versus tidiness).  As long as something's not coated with dust or has a spider's carapace stuck to it somewhere I'm usually satisified with its sanitation.

So, here is a look back on our beginnings:

And the somewhat refreshing present day:

What's ironic about the title of this blog is that St. Crisp said you never need to clean house: "...After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse."  It's not just dirt I've been worried about, it's avalanches of books and boxes! 

I want to add before I forget that there is a really good resource in Portland for people who are as nuts about recycling as I am: Portland Metro's hotline!  It's 503-234-3000.  They used to have groovy radio ads and I decided to give them a call when I wanted to ditch some odd things years ago.  An operator can tell you who will accept what.

And don't you dare forget The ReBuilding Center.  I had a stack of old plywood in the Bad Apple for a long time, they took it as well as other carpentry bits that were not useful to me.  I found some hand tools that I think they can use too. 

St. Crisp, or, I'm So Glad You Asked

Someone asked me today about the title of my blog and I never really thought to explain it before.  It started out as a different kind of blog, you see, and as I told my friend today I kept the name because I don't want anyone else to use it.

This is Quentin Crisp:

He wrote several books, among them was a memoir called The Naked Civil Servant.  It's about his life as an openly gay young man in London at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England.  The title of my blog is adapted from a line from this book.  Fitzrovia was a bohemian part of London, where notables like Virginia Woolf once lived, and where Quentin hobnobbed with his friends. 

Here's another photo of Quentin, a still from a great movie called Orlando (based on the novel by Ms. Woolf):

His career seemed to really take off in his old age, with writing and acting and spoken word performances galore.  He was working past his 90th birthday.  How amazing is that?

There were two movies made about him, and John Hurt played him in both, three decades apart: The Naked Civil Servant and An Englishman in New York.  You can borrow them both from the Multnomah County Library!