15 posts tagged “vox hunt”

These thirty candles were supposed to spell out "Aaron" for my brother's birthday. Instead, they look something like "crglarbleglarble." It's hard to write with candles.

Also, not only do we still have a "Happy Holidays" tablecloth on our kitchen table, our Christmas tree is still up. In March. We all say that it's because my three-month old nephew finds both the snowmen on the tablecloth and the blinking tree lights hysterical but there is actually another reason and that reason is that I haven't gotten around to doing it yet and it's, apparently, my job. Hmph.

It's eye-crossing, mousehand-seizing, talk-to-yourself-about-cake all-day-long fun!

The way that I know it's a good cover is that the same bits in Sufjan's version give me goosebumps as the bits in the original Stipe-y version.

When I was younger and in the habit of hanging things on my walls (nowadays, I utilize a corkboard that has the United States on it to pin small mementos that I want to see every day), my aunt Debbie and I went to some sort of art store. I must have been thirteen or so. And we both picked out prints of artwork and then she bought me the poster as a little aunt-to-niece, no-special-reason present. She picked out a Van Gogh print and I picked out Georgia O'Keeffe's "Dark Iris I."

I loved purple then, just as I adore the vivid shades of lilac and violet and indigo now. That's what drew me to this print, I'm sure, because I know that I had no idea who O'Keeffe was at that time.

But then when I was in tenth grade, I took a Painting I course at my high school, taught by a woman who had been teaching there for more than forty years at that time and, in fact, is still teaching there to this day. She had a completely different style of teaching than I was accustomed to, telling all of us to finish things whenever we wanted as long as it was by the end of the semester and routinely beginning new assignments before any of us were done with the two she'd already given us that week. It was such a weird way to learn, very collegiate for fifteen year olds, but kind of enjoyable in that "I can put this stuff off forever! La la la, paint paint paint, talk talk talk, dance the Time Warp with the adorably fun redheaded artsy twin girls...oh shit, it's the midterms" sort of way. You know the one I mean.

Anyway, I enjoyed painting though I had, and still have, the oddly unartistic habit of outlining whatever I'm painting. Everything that I've ever created with watercolors or oils has a black border around it to some degree. I like lines, dammit, can't anyone understand me?

One day, the teacher told me that what I was painting, a mountain scene that I was trying to utilize to paint out a recurring dream of mine involving purple cliffs and pushing people off of them (...yep), reminded her of something very similar to O'Keeffe. And she got out all her Big Books of Art and showed me several sections on Georgia's Irises and woodland scenes and vaginas and whatnot.

(I didn't see the vaginas. Only other people see the vaginas, in fact, my parents were skirting around the issue of my sexuality for a few years in there when I insisted on only having what most people consider the most vagina-esque prints of O'Keeffe in my bedroom. I felt like saying, "Yes, yes, Mother and Father, I'm a lesbian who likes painted vaginas! Can't anyone understand me? Again?")



I realized that the print that I already had was an O'Keeffe which was something I hadn't paid much attention to, up until that point, and then I became a huge O'Keeffe freak and had her stuff all over my room, as well as several photographs that her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, had taken of her.

Perhaps the picture at right also had my parents wondering. But the combined artistic talent of Stieglitz and O'Keeffe is fascinating. The fact that she used the world around her and her husband's influences to create her art and that Stieglitz, in part, used his world and Georgia's physical form to create his art is...symbiotic. And beautiful, I think.

If or when I travel to the southwest, my very first stop would be in Santa Fe for the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. I don't even know anyone who has ever been there but I imagine wonderful things. At the very least, I would buy this excellent O'K mug. And I know I can buy it online for only six bucks and have it shipped to me but that wouldn't be the same thing at all, would it?

I love this picture for the following reasons:

1) I carry my camera everywhere but not enough people do zany things around me. UNTIL THIS DAY. And on a few other days but I really am going to start insisting that everyone get out there and pump up the jam on wackiness.

2) The woman in the foreground is the older sister of the man in the background. I've known both of these people for twenty years or so and love them dearly. However, they've grown apart in recent years due to growing up and paths taken and blah blah blah adulthood blah. So it was fun to see them together for a dinner in a town near Akron.

3) She was eating a gyro and when we all looked up from our meals, we noticed that both of her hands were almost entirely covered with cucumber garlic sauce. It was...disturbing, to say the least. And awesome, to say the most.

4) The picture I was trying to snap was the one where the brother, Casey, smashed the hand of the sister, Sabrina, into her face, covering her lower face with cucumber sauce. But instead I got the aftermath which was Sabrina almost choking on part of her gyro because she started laughing when she found herself the victim of a practical joke that only a little brother could get away with.

5) The opposite expressions on their faces.

(No one was injured. But we sort of traumatized the waiter.)

The bottom one is Rigby, sitting on his favorite resting place in the world. I often wonder why this stool is still around - it's uncomfortable, nobody likes sitting on it and it's falling apart in places. And then I remember, Rigby would kill us in our sleep if we got rid of it. Note my grandfather's cane in the background, one of the few souvenirs we have from my mother's father. That cane gets knocked over more than you can even imagine.