Peer Pressure, Post Cold War

I've been pestering my artist friends Sean and Daria to take my double-decker flat file out of my place.  I missed my opportunity last weekend to show it to both of them in person, when they and several other fine individuals were in my house watching Eating Raoul.  Once it's out of my hands it's going to hold some first-rate prints and original art once more, you can take that to the bank.  I hope I'll be able to move it out this week, we'll see. 

I still have to store the stuff that's in the file drawers right now.  I will never have to buy new Bristol board again, for example.  My friend Kerri has returned from being overseas this past year, and she offered to help me get new plywood for shelves in that room.  She and I have plenty of vintage home decor field trips planned, as well as a day trip to the gorge pencilled in while she's here in town for the next month.  Kerri gave me the phenomenal bookcase that stands in my living room, when she moved out of the country.

It took me over an hour to write those little paragraphs, I've been conversing with some of the people I mentioned and copying some Pelican and MC Lyte cds.  I don't normally work this way.  I'm kind of zonked so I think I'll go home and do some housework.  It sounds like another movie night is in store.  If it was my turn to choose I might want to see this one:

 


  


  

Hello my little Chickadee

I did the Twilight Rummage Sale last night at the Eagles Lodge.  It happened a week earlier than usual for reasons yet unknown, and the Bite of Oregon festival probably stole a lot of our potential visitors.  I did all right though.

The crowd there is totally right for the kind of stuff I keep bringing.  A lot of fans of film noir, British spy films/TV, horror of all kinds, and sci-fi B-movies.  Not doing so great: dramas about failing marriages in the 1970s, documentaries, or action films.  Here's a tip for you shoppers: when you set something down, you better make sure you pick it up again when you're still standing there.  I had a woman place a box set aside thinking I knew she wanted it, and another guy nearly nabbed it.  A guy who I see everywhere, who I used to think was J Mascis, left his UFO or Die 7" on my table and went home without it.  Don't worry dude, I'll hang onto it until I bump into you again.

I spoke to the guy who DJs the sale, who also happens to be one of my regular comics customers and a pretty nice person overall.  He showed me the equipment I'll need for when I DJ at the next Comix Thing happening in November.  I know it's super soon to be thinking about it but it turns out that I need a mixer, which I don't have.  I have everything else I need.  Another guy who works at the Lodge has offered to help me practice setting up and trying out everything.  When I worked at the radio stations they had everything there you needed, plugged in and ready to go, so this is the first time I have had to set up almost from scratch.  I have trouble figuring out how to set up my stereo at home so you can understand the head start I'm giving myself.  I know a lot of DJs and they are all so friendly and helpful, there are no snobs among them.

Return to Green Gables

April was a busy month and left little time to make some lasting impact on my housework.  When guests come to stay I use the office to throw all the random papers and supplies, so now I have to undo that mess.

This past week alone I was involved in several major events, including Stumptown Comics Fest and Gridlords.  There have been a lot of big things happening, including the announcement that I've passed ownership of the business I owned up until two months ago to my employee/business partner.  Also my birthday was yesterday along with everything else going on.  Now I feel like I can start catching up on some things I have put aside for a little while.

I admit that for the past month I've been blocked in terms of writing in here.  I was really on a roll for a while before that, with all the posts I completed.  It's hard to write about what really is just self-actualization silliness when there is so much going on in the world.

Today I'm handling the office, getting the stacks of papers and files off the floor.  Here's where I'm at right now:

I'm watching season 2 of Game of Thrones.  It was my birthday present to myself, along with a giant buttermilk donut from Blue Star Donuts.  Heaven on earth.

Something is in retrograde

I don't follow astrology very much but I found this story someone posted on Facebook and all I can think is that it's doing something peculiar to my undertakings this week.

Remember Bob?  I got two calls from him today; he thought he had a pickup to do at my house but it turns out he was supposed to pick up some tires somewhere else.  Even after I let his wife know he made a mistake, he called looking for directions to my house.  Luckily I set him straight before he made it to my neighborhood.

In eBay related news, I had not one but two people try to back out of sales after the auctions' completions, for no good reason other than they changed their minds.  One person decided to pay before I could react to her message about the cancellation request.  The other, who was in Canada, said she didn't want it because the postage was unexpectedly too high.  Not only would she have been able to calculate that ahead of time, the cost was $4 higher than the US economy rate I had listed.  After some back and forth, in which she changed her reasons several times for wanting to cancel, she finally paid.  I take the bidding thing seriously, the stuff is up for an entire week so there's plenty of time to retract bids.  After a week of hoping something will sell, I don't want to wait another week unnecessarily!

Is it a further coincidence that last night I watched A Dangerous Method again, in which Jung claims he doesn't believe in coincidences?  I think fate is trying to tell me to do things I've been putting off and stop being so flaky, i.e. to finish my accounting & tax documents once and for all.

Is it weird that I find this scene so soothing? 

I am expecting guests tomorrow night, and there's a lot of work to do around the house.  I've got to move a few shortboxes full of comics from the living room.  Also I have to keep in mind that one of those guests is a roly-poly teething baby!  I must baby-proof like the wind.

The dark horses at the eBay races

For the last few days I've been posting a quantity of items on eBay and seeing some surprising results.  I know the things I'm putting up for auction have some value, but it amazes me to see what people will collect.  A broken antique stereoscope went online this afternoon and already has a bid.  A wooden game board that I expected to bring in under $10 is up to three times that.  I wasn't even sure this stuff was going to get a second look, but you never know.  The old favorite, bakelite, is still garnering lots of attention, and there is some in one of my active auctions right now.  I'm short on packing materials.  I have bubble wrap but not enough boxes.  I'm kicking myself for being so thorough on some of the recycling last year, but spilt milk and all that.

I watched a terrifying movie while I was sorting out my office closet a couple days ago: Martha Marcy May Marlene.  It's about a young woman who escapes a cult and experiences psychological problems in the aftermath.  I got so freaked out I felt like I was tiptoeing around the house until I went to bed.  Then I had a dream that someone came in my house while I was sleeping and left the front door open!  This movie was really good, but if you see it, don't watch it alone at night! 

The Out-of-Doors Me

For the last three months I've been putting more energy into getting full-time work, even though I'm putting just as much as ever into the whole organizing thing.  Today I had the first job interview I've had where I got it myself, and an employment agency didn't set it up for me.  People are really reading the resumes I'm seemingly sending out into thin air!  And today I got a postcard from another potential employer to say that they are reviewing my qualifications; that's something, even if it's a form letter, more or less.

Fraulein Sophie Von Prieser by Florine Stettheimer, 1929

I took up a volunteer position at the art museum to help me get more comfortable with working around people I don't know all that well.  It's been all right so far, and it's even brought some unexpected benefits.  I can visit the museum for free, and I can get into film center movies for free.  There's also a model drawing night once a month to which volunteers and employees can attend at no charge, otherwise there's a small fee.  Alas, I have not been able to attend on my last two chances.  Another great thing is that the Portland International Film Festival is happening now, and if I volunteer I get free standby passes.  I’ve always loved the museum, I’m glad I get to spend so much time there now!  The art pieces I like are friends.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I put that free box on the sidewalk that I was talking about doing.  I had just put it down and was getting ready to back out of my driveway when a man stopped to look through the box.  When I got home later it was gone!  I want to add that while putting out free stuff is excellent in so many ways, when it’s left in the rain for days on end it becomes garbage!  People should take their stuff back indoors if no one wants it!

It's a mug's game

Here's some music while you read:

The lyrics to the song are a lot sadder than I actually feel, but I'm getting weighed down by the seasonal affective nonsense this week.  I can't seem to keep a train of thought going during the day, and I get weirdly more motivated as it gets later at night.  Right now I was going through a pile of Dylan's sketchbooks and other assorted papers to find safe spots to keep them.

I watched a terrible movie today: The Proposal.  Stupid!  I was hoping for more from Betty White, which is why I borrowed it from the library in the first place.  Sometimes I'll watch a dumb-ish movie while I do housework and I can listen to it without missing much if I'm looking away.  I don't like Ryan Reynolds at all or Sandra Bullock, let that be a lesson to me.

The fact that I had to go to the dentist today didn't help anything either.  And I forgot to bring enough bus fare to pay my way back from OHSU, so I had to walk down the hill in the gloom of a Portland evening.  I kept looking down the steep side of the hill that slopes sharply down from the sidewalk - more of a cliff, really - and thinking that a car could careen off the road and hit me and we'd all go over the edge, and I'd be impaled on a leafless tree branch!!

It's time to bring up the sun lamp from the basement, I think.  This S.A.D. is hitting code yellow, where I feel it but I'm not hopeless yet.

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!

Another Beer Please

I finally caved and rented Game of Thrones from Movie Madness last night.  I have it on hold at the library but I'm about #350 of 500 holds, and that's for season one.  Everything people have been telling me about it has turned out to be absolutely true: massive amounts of female toplessness, sex and violence, plenty of gore.  And that's just in the first 15 minutes of episode one!  Peter Dinklage is great as ever.  I'm not sure why there isn't more male nudity.  If HBO has a nudity quota, there should be yin and yang.  Behinds almost don't count anymore, after everything we've had to view on NYPD Blue on network TV years ago.

I was away for a while over the weekend but I made up for it last night by assembling the wooden shelves I had repaired.  I put them in the laundry room.  I've already got a call in to Salvation Army to get some furniture I don't want.  I can't understand why you need to schedule pickups a couple weeks ahead, but it gives me time to add to the giveaway quantity.  I also can't understand why a simple do-it-yourself pine shelving set is so hard to get to fit together correctly.  I KNOW it's not because I hit it with my car, because I've had this problem before with another, identical shelf.

Things are looking pretty good in the basement, it's almost time for another update photo.  I've extended  my efforts to include the laundry room.  I had a bittersweet moment last night when moving a shelf and sweeping; I found some of Dylan's underwear and socks that had fallen behind the dryer long ago.  I washed them today, and put them in a collection of special things of his I'm keeping.

Free Will vs. SAD

Thanks everybody who has been reading my silly blog, I really appreciate it.  Thanks also to my new followers.  I hope I'll have more soon, but then I forget to be an official follower of my friends' blogs so I don't really deserve it.

As much as I am loathe to I decided to dive into cataloging all the books I'm donating, I made a nice spreadsheet and it's going faster than I thought it would.  I've got to take pictures of all of them too, can you believe it?  I hope the tax man doesn't want photos someday of all the crap I gave to Goodwill this year, because I sure have a lot of receipts for it.  I am asserting my willpower over my urge to put off the book stuff, because after getting back from California last week I became acutely aware that my good spirits wouldn't last while I am procrastinating.  We've had driving rain for days, whereas when I left for the Bay Area and during my trip there'd been nothing but sunshine.  I'm trying to head off any feelings of depression this season.  I have some problems every winter, but this year I'm going to be aware of them before they happen and use some focus to work through them.  I really want to get my living room ready again to have friends over and it's hardly in that state now.

Here is a piece from a really good DVD zine from some creative folks in Canada, it's called the Winking Circle.  I found it at random at the library!

Watching stuff like this makes me feel a lot better about the world. 

In other news, two of my friends had to follow me down into the basement today so we could get to my garage & drive away.  They could see for themselves that I've been working hard! 

A few words before bed...

I'm up so late because I spent the evening with my sister and her boyfriend - they cooked me dinner and then we watched A Dangerous Method, one of the latest movies by David Cronenberg.  It's the one about a female patient of Carl Jung who also eventually became a revered psychoanalyst, before WWI.  It was fantastic, but wasted a little bit on me because I dozed off a couple times and lost a few seconds here and there.  I just need to catch up on sleep, there was nothing wrong with the story.  I'd like to watch it again so I catch all the dialogue and fully process everything.

I'm away from where I usually write my blog so I can't insert some clever pictures or document my home improvement project.  I haven't been able to do it in a few days.  After I wrote my entry for yesterday I thought that my advice was too pithy.  The truth is when I get back to what I was doing I plan to move into the more difficult stage of my mess management, and I've been talking around it.  A huge reason I'm doing all of this is because my husband died last year, and I need to get down to finding some new homes for his huge collection of books and some other possessions, but mostly books.  I have a hard time conveying to anyone the monumental task this is, not just emotionally, but the sheer amount of material there is to deal with.  Part of me wants to take another year to manage it all, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that in order to deal with his passing I'm going to have to face parting with some of his things.  He was an artist, a scholar and a writer, and I've made arrangements with a local art college to take a large amount of his books.  This way I know that students will continue to learn from them, and they'll be a place that prizes them.  It's hard to look at his things as just stuff.  My husband tried to make it seem like his things weren't especially important, but he collected them lovingly over years' time and they helped him make his own contributions to art and writing.

I think the best way for me to handle this task is to involve friends to work alongside me.  It might make the job go faster and it will be good to have their support.  I look at a lot of the organizing work I've done so far  as groundwork for the toil ahead of me. 

You don't LOOK like a chili dog

More selling of books today, and donating to Title Wave.  You may think that my whole life right now is sorting out my crap, and you would be partly right.  I don't have a full time job at the moment, and this is an urgent matter, so I'm trying to stick with it as much as I can.  Also, I worked very hard closing down the store I ran, The Bad Apple, so I'm trying to take it kind of easy.  I messed up my back a little and I have a recurrence of plantar fascitis in my right foot.  I'm only lifting little things for now, and using a cart whenever possible.

Here's an old photo of The Bad Apple, around the time my husband Dylan opened it with his friend Tim three and a half years ago:

That's Patrick McGoohan's face on the wall there, though if you've ever watched The Prisoner you don't need to wonder where that still is from!

This is only a very small portion of the stuff it eventually had.  Books, books, books, and lots of dvds and vhs tapes.  Not to mention the furniture and fixtures.  And, wait, there was a back room where Dylan ran a comic book publishing company, Sparkplug Comic Books.  Here's a photo of that, from way back:

When I think it will be too hard to get my personal space in order, I tell myself that I coordinated moving everything in this space (which was much more stuff than you see here).  This was an 1800sf space!  I should be able to manage the 200sf or so that I am overseeing now.

I'd like to say a word here about Craigslist, and what a help it was to me over the last few weeks!  I sold a few pieces of furniture, and that was great for raising the money needed for the move and the new Sparkplug location.  However, the "free stuff" classifieds are just as good when you need to get a load out quickly.  It's like getting a moving company for free!  I got rid of some huge, slightly damaged metal shelves that I was dreading having to take out on my own. The same for a big old sofa bed with tears and stains.  People will take the weirdest things as long as they're free!  I got about 75 email inquiries in just a few hours on one ad.

Portland Store Fixtures was pretty great for this kind of thing too.  They bought a couple fixtures and completely lowballed me (I mean LOWballed).  But, they offered to take anything else that I didn't want.  Apparently they have ways of recycling that thrift stores can't do.  I gave them all the damaged or flat out broken stuff that I had left after the Craigslist sweep.  The only thing the pickup dude wouldn't take was a pane of chipped glass that I was having trouble throwing out.  Whatever, I just thought I'd ask if he wanted it.  This experience has kept my enthusiasm for the Portland Store Fixtures high.  I got compensated in junk removal.  If I ever wanted to start a new store, I know they'd have whatever I needed and cheap-ish, so I still think they're rad.

I was watching NCIS Los Angeles this evening while making yet another pile of things to take to SCRAP* and a guy in it says "Now I feel like a chili dog" after looking at some photos of a criminal rendezvous at the Santa Monica pier, or someplace like that.  The girl he's talking to looks at him dumbfounded.  Just LOOKS at him.

*SCRAP, 2915 NE MLK Blvd, Portland OR 97212 (503-294-0769), scrappdx.org.  Best place ever to find cheap and plentiful donated art supplies!  Best place to donate them to also!

Helpful hints from Mama Ingrid, et al

Isabella Rossellini wrote a memoir called Some of Me, in which she shared her mother's (Ingrid Bergman, that is) own methods for cleaning up after a party at the Rossellini household.  That advice was, never leave the room empty handed.  That's something I'm taking to heart these days, but I'm taking it a step further.  I never leave the house without something in my hand, or my car, that I won't be bringing back to take up space in my house again!  For example, I take stuff to Goodwill, or to Far West Fibers, which is the massive recycling center off SE Holgate in Portland.  You can take shoes, appliances, and white styrofoam there!

One of my friends told me about a cleanup he did at his own house, where he decided that nothing he didn't want was going back into his bedroom.  So now I'm looking at things more critically to determine if I really want the things I'm keeping around. 

Today I didn't do a whole lot, though I tried.  I put a few things in the car to take over to Village Merchants, one of my favorite thrift stores in town, on SE Division.  When I got there I remembered that they don't take items on Sundays.  So, those things are still in my car.

I shifted a few things around in the basement and took a few things upstairs to sort, so there is a nearly detectable improvement.  At least there are no more falling boxes.

So in the photo above, we have the same view on two different nights.  The one on the left is from tonight, so that is the "after" shot.  I'm getting somewhere but am I just putting the crap in my living space upstairs?  Am I just kidding myself?

PS: I just finished Dangerous Angels, the collected novels of the Weetzie Bat series by Francesca Lia Block.  It was so good, I had borrowed it from the library but I want to get my own copy to keep.  It's a perfect manual for finding love and beauty in a fucked up and dangerous world, and not losing hope.  It's just what I needed to read right at this time in my life.