The Hot 100!!!

It's blog post #100!  Time for a little celebration.

Once a year the citizens of Iceland blow up their whole capitol city and rebuild it from the ground up.  It keeps things fresh and exciting.

Those aren't words I'd use to describe my next big task, but it will be a lot more so once I get into it.  That is, I'm cleaning the nerve center of the basement, the storage room where Dylan kept about 5 million books and papers.  I've started a little but there's a lot to dig through.

I've shown a similar pic before.  The room is too small to get a good panorama shot, so I collaged it.  How can such a small room be so intimidating?!

If there's one thing I learned this year, is to recognize when I'm afraid to mess up, then find a way to start anyway.  I got more art done that way. 

Packing Radness

I mailed four boxes of mini comics to the Dylan Williams Collection at OSU last week, and found out a couple days ago that they arrived safely at their destination.  They weighed over 40 pounds each.  That's a person's weight in comics!!  Or four school children.  Anyway, they are at their new home.  It was hard to choose which ones were going.  I have a lot of them still, mostly the ones by close friends or ones I had been collecting for years.  I hope they'll inspire a kid to make his or her first book.

Things Fall Apart

I got a bookcase from a friend when she decided to move to New York, and decided to make room for it in the basement.  Thinking that I would just slide it in next to the large metal shelves that had been there for a decade, I moved a table that had been standing there for almost as long.  It turns out that the table had been holding up the shelves all those years.  Immediately the shelving began to buckle sideways and fall over.  I spent the next hour holding the thing up with one hand and removing everything from it with the other.  Do you know how hard it is to reach over head and move objects that way?  I had built the shelving wrong to begin with, and forgotten all about it.  This is why you need to built things safely and correctly!  It could have been much worse.  It was covered with books and could have fallen on me, causing serious injuries.  I threw almost everything that I knew wouldn't break onto the floor.

A few days later, with the help of friend Sean, I got some heavy-duty plastic shelves to replace the one I ultimately took apart and gave away to my neighbors.  The new shelves were easy to put together, just like Tinker Toys.  Very stable, too.  As it turns out, they are the same kind we got when we moved Sparkplug to its new home-office location.

The white melamine shelf on the right was a gift from my friend Nusha, who moved away recently.  Friends who are moving are a great source of shelving.  They don't have to haul it, you get a fine unit, win-win.

Donate to a great comics cause!

I'm getting ready to make a sizable donation of small press/self published comics.  Don't worry, if you're reading this I'm most likely keeping your stuff unless I've got doubles!  Over at the Ohio State University, they have a special collection of just such things named after my husband Dylan.  I'm really honored on his behalf to contribute a lot of the work he collected over the last couple decades.  Dylan discovered a lot of amazing work that might get overlooked, because small press stuff tends to not get the publicity and distribution it deserves. 

Caitlin McGurk is curating the Dylan Williams Collection, please contact her at mcgurk.17@osu.edu or call 614-292-0538.  I mentioned her in a previous post ages ago.  She's super nice and learned on the subject of indie comics and zines.

As a lot of you know, Dylan's and my books and comics together make a vast personal library, and going through them is a massive undertaking.  I'm keeping a ton of stuff, but it feels like I could build another house with the volume of materials that I have on hand. 

Basement library beatdown

I'm back in the basement again pruning the usual junk.  I'm going through the books Dylan had down there and picking out what I mean to keep.

I intend to give some more books to friends and have Powell's Books buy most of the rest.  Though I think I'd like the Portland Art Museum's  library to have some.  Dylan had the most amazing collection of comics by overseas creators all over the world.  I think it would be great to have them in a place where people who love art want to be.

I concede that it doesn't look great down here, but it's better than before.  And you can see the entire bookcases, as I removed the junk on the floor in front of it.

Remember this?

And this?

I'm glad I took pictures.  Otherwise I'd feel like nothing is really changing.

Going through the books this time is surprisingly similar, emotionally, to all the other sifting I did with Dylan's collections.  It's a little easier to reason with myself about where these will all end up, but I still experience some self-recrimination and sorrow.  Also, the mental and physical exhaustion of the process.  I need a foot rub after all this. 

E-Z Rock School of Agriculture

 The garden box has a joyous mix of dirt, compost and topsoil and I've already got some strawberries and tomatoes planted.  So what is the problem?

I know that Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock aren't exactly expressing frustration at the current Portland weather patterns here, but I thought the chorus reflects the mercurial nature of our sun and precipitation each day.

I'm the headliner of this show
And you're just a kid and you need to grow

Dirt Life

I'm going to need to bring the hose inside and spray down everything because my planting and building is bringing a lot of mess into the kitchen.  I'm trying to sprout some starts so there is potting soil everywhere.  I tracked in some mud from the backyard while making the garden box.  I've been filling it with dirt all week and it still needs more.  I've supplemented it with compost, including all the stuff I've been brewing in my Earth Machine.  The chickens from next door sure love my compost.  I'm hoping they'll add a little fertilizer of their own to my little garden.  I'm ready for more serious labor this weekend.  Aaaaaannnndddd...some real planting of real seeds and shoots in the place I've been preparing for them all this time!

I'll get a newer pic with dirt and stuff real soon.

 I'll be at the Twilight Rummage sale again tomorrow night.  Won't you visit?  All monies that I earn go towards some important shit.  Like more plants!  And paint!