This past week has felt like a month and I am exhausted. Two deaths, three+ birthdays, and one sinus infection. Not to mention another move on the horizon! At least the move is a good thing. I was going to write more about it, but I think I am just going to go back to bed, where I belong.
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I love love love a dollmaker and this lil picrew is so cute. I really like this style, which reminds me of Mary Blair's concept art.
The weather is changing and the sun has been out and now I feel powerful and I never want to deal with winter ever again. Making this lil portrait reminded me of when i was a kid and I had the Klutz face painting book and I would paint all the kids' faces in my neighborhood. Mama had finished hairdressing school and so a family friend gave her a vintage barber's chair that lived under the awning by the driveway, and so the kids would sit in the barber's chair and pick out a design and I would paint it and so on until we decided to go roller skate around the block or run through the woods or some other such pursuit. It also reminds me of a Bible storybook I had as a kid, Catherine Marshall's Story Bible, where all the illustrations are by children and so one of them has a girl who is brought back to life and she has cherry cheeks or cherry earrings. I don't know 'cause I can never find good pictures of the illustrations in that book online. The sun has given me complete and total energy for everything except maybe doing homework (BOOOOO), although I have done some homework today. "I've had it," I told one of my friends, "I'm going feral." This was followed up with "Me in the woods roasting a slice of pizza on a stick", which was inspirational. Generally I have not been on the Twitter dot com, but I did look at it briefly yesterday on account of someone sent me a message and saw the tweet of a stranger complaining about Instagram, as yet another victim of Instagram's robot algorithm deleting someone's account for violation of their wildly conservative terms of service (which include "emoji strings" that Instagram finds salacious). They're wildly obnoxious and I deleted my account last year shortly after the uproar about the TOS.
The thing about Instagram is, they do not give a flying fuck about you, your art, your followers. You are probably never going to talk to an Actual Human about whether or not your account is truly violating the TOS, and in other news, unless you have Actually Read the current TOS and not gotten your information from someone's Instagram story, your account probably is violating their TOS, because the TOS has become increasingly more restrictive over the years. And if your account is not Actually Violating the TOS, again, there is no person who does that. It is all robots, or whatever, programmed to look for whatever they can parse as nudity, and they will take it down. This even happened to models I followed with millions of followers, and it happens to some and not others, and yes it is frustrating! But Instagram doesn't care. And y'all should leave. Tell your followers that Instagram is not a good platform for you and you have a blog now, or if Instagram is wildly important to your following then post a teaser image that people have to then visit your blog to see. If you are popular and have a lot of friends then organize! Get your friends together and make a little webring and y'all can get a bunch of people to delete Instagram on one day, which is what everyone should've done when they came out with the TOS shit. Mass deletion of accounts MIGHT make Instagram pay attention but I Doubt It. If you are going to stay on Instagram, you should actually read the TOS so that you're not in danger of having your account deleted, and pay attention to what they're looking for so that you're not giving them something new to look for. What do I mean by that? Well, Instagram checks your captions as well as your photos. I have had photos removed for the caption "Send nudes", even though my photo was not nude, because "send nudes" is a sexual solicitation and violates the TOS. This is similar to models linking to their OnlyFans - Instagram considers it solicitation of sexual services. People tend to solve this by making a code word like spelling OnlyFans "0nlyFan$", or rhyming like "OnlyCrayons", and so on. As a Gen X-er who also swerves around rules, I approve of the method. However, it's a temporary fix as the algorithm will eventually pick this up and start flagging those as well. Don't contribute neologisms to their algorithm just so Instagram can find you and delete your account. It's a lose-lose situation for a lot of people & I was never popular enough on Instagram to rally people around my cause, but I hate to see people struggle with this when they could take their data and go. Take your data and go! Tell your friends! Stake out your own corner of the internet where no one will delete your work because you posted "eggplant emoji, three drops of water emoji, tongue emoji"! You will not miss it. Mama would never buy me anything good as a kid, and by anything good I mean a bow and arrow (I was very small but still had a Yearning to shoot the peacocks at Knotts Berry Farm or some similar theme park) or a slingshot (which is what I always wanted at the Li'l Champ down the street from my grandparents' house but had to settle for something else, like jacks). Today I made one and my idea was to shoot acorns at the big chimes in the community garden, but then people started being in that area and then after trying to figure out how to Git Good at sling shottin, it slid out of its restraints. Now I have to come back inside (boo) and do homework (BOOOO). As my granddaddy would say, "Sounds like a bunch of bull shit to me," and, he's right. The sun is out and I want to buy yellow overalls and go feral. I made a depressing zine and mailed it out to some people & I am happy to report that people got them & they did not get returned to sender. I was wingin' it. I'm happy with how nicely it copied to black and white.
Lemme go lay in my little blanket fort and do this reading. I have been looking for more representation in women's surfing for a while now - occasionally we get thrown a crumb of a nice story about Black or Muslim surfers, and I was excited to see more women of color in the last women's event I watched, though it's now been so long that I don't remember which event it was. Meanwhile, finally, there is a Black model on the Roxy website!! In the first page of results! I wish I was more excited about this, but it also coincides with this strange decision on someone's part at Roxy to come out with the most boring and ugly collection variation that I've seen in a long time. Roxy is really the only brand that I look for to throw money in their direction, and it's been a bummer to see them go from the colorful, fun collections of the 2010s to the muted, drab, boring collections they've put out as of late. Someone in design is asleep at the wheel. I have frequent longings for a pair of Roxy slip-ons I owned that were white with a sublimated palm tree print, and I wore them until there were holes in the toes. And even then I tried to embroider the holes closed just so I could keep wearing them. Unfortunately, every shoe must have its day, and so I bought a new pair of Roxy slides that I wore a little less often but that still lasted me three years - until I had worn a hole in the sole. I looked for a replacement, but everything at the site was either out of stock in my size or had jute on the bottom, and were mostly these slip-on shoes with laces that are basically fake sneakers. (So now I have Toms. That's cause I was too cheap to buy fancy Vans. Anyway.)
I also don't know what they are doing in general, as once I got a marketing email from them with a backpack or something in the header image of the email, and I scoured the site for it and finally got someone on chat to talk to me about it, and it was not on the site because it was out of stock. So they prominently featured an out of stock, unlisted item in their sales email. I always want to ask them if they are ok. Are they hydrating? Did they skip lunch? Mainly what I think about in terms of Roxy is that they seem to put out collections in line with the standards of fast fashion - I'm not 100% up on this, because I think I unsubscribed from their emails - and we know fast fashion is so bad for our environment. It would seem that because Roxy is a surf brand, they might make more of a commitment to the environment as well as to fair labor practices, but it ain't necessarily so. Unfortunately, companies have to do more than just recycle plastic into boardshorts or rashguards - there are other standards to abide by to be truly sustainable, and there's no evidence that Roxy or Quiksilver has been doing their part to put those practices in place. Do better, Roxy! I say that with love. Because once upon a time you were slightly cooler. Here's a list of actually sustainable surf brands, which probably no one reading this cares about! But I care! I know you don't care too much, but...I still care. Baby! If u don't like it u can get ur own blog. I wish you would! In Kentucky, I'm Royal Montgomery. No swell out here, as you can see. Back to you, Strider! My lil friendo, my pal-io, my virtual studio partner Monát has been in the swamp lately, so I haven't had anyone to scream about scary stories with. Now and then I send her a little mail. Hopefully she is better soon. I missed having my friendo around so that also put me in the swamp. Just a little. My solution in these times is to call John Dure Morgan. "You can call me anytime!" he said once. Big mistake, John. Just kidding. John had me make him a Sad Night Crime postcard last year and he took it and turned it into a collage. He said, "Hey, send me another postcard and I'll make a collage with it, like the last one." So I put down a little watercolor wash and then kind of thought about things for a couple days and finally made some slime. When in doubt... I'm not sure how John will feel about this one. That's okay. I am having a good time.
After I made that last post, I thought I'd make a little ad for my ice cream place. Or ice cream truck. Or ice cream van. I had to ask my friends about it. Everything's better with friends, especially creative endeavors. My friends had great ice cream flavors and most of them were too long for me to write on this postcard. (I mean, I couldn't even fit "ice cream" on the postcard; luckily "ice crem" is a nice joke from a friend's LiveJournal. Oh grand.) Here are some more ice cream flavors that did not fit on the postcard: ♡ Russian Wild Strawberry ♡ Cakes and Ale ♡ Green Tea and Ginger ♡ White Pepper (Cibo Matto's impact) ♡ Horchata ♡ Xocolātl ♡ Pumpkin, Brown Butter, and Sage ♡ Sweet Corn Custard with Grilled Corn Kernels, Cotija, Ancho Chile Powder, and Lime ♡ Negroni Sorbet ♡ Kinako and Kuromitsu (Roasted Soybean and Black Sugar) ♡ Bananas Foster ♡ Buttered Crab (or Buttered Lobster) ♡ Star Anise with Char Siu bits and a Hoisin sauce ribbon ♡ Sweet Potato with Cardamom syrup and Marshmallow Fluff ♡ Crab Rangoon ♡ Gin, Mint, and Lemongrass Sorbet ♡ Amaretto Peach ♡ Sweet Tea with Roasted Peach ♡ Black Tea with Lemon Curd ♡ Darjeeling with Lemon-Lavender Syrup ♡ Peanut Butter Saltine Cracker ♡ Chocolate Chip Caramel with grated, salt-preserved Egg Yolk ♡ Robitussin (I think this should be a shave ice) ♡ Cream cheese ice cream in a Ritz cracker cone with a line of jalapeño jelly through it Update: our hypothetical ice cream truck has a hypothetical investor:
I grew up on a small island in Florida. In retrospect, it has made me into a chill adult who is on Island Time (unless it comes to people texting me back. Why can't they do that in a timely fashion?), but as a child it kind of sucked. I was about to digress into why being a kid sucked but I'll go on about that another time. Anyway, at that time the island had one very popular ice-cream parlor that also sold fudge and similar chocolate-covered treats, and there would be tons of tourists just eating up their ice cream in January while locals looked at them in disgust. "Who eats ice cream in winter?", we'd say disdainfully of these filthy perverts.
Anyway, now I am an adult (alhamdulillah), and my blood has thickened from not being in Florida for three years and I eat ice cream in the winter. What is exciting now is that people make weird flavors of ice cream and I am all about this life. I always wanted an ice cream maker so I could make my own weird ice cream. I might have to look into this more. I heard the modern ones could be kind of fussy so maybe I can get the old style one with the crank. When I heard about Persian ice cream - bastani - I kind of made up my own method for it as I knew I was not going to get bastani anywhere near my hometown. The closest thing they have to middle easterners are the weirdo Zionists who run the Sunoco. Anyway. My system was to buy vanilla ice cream and let it soften a bit, and put it in the blender with some saffron water and rose water. Also I would pour heavy cream on a plate and freeze it and break it up into chunks with a knife and mix it with the blended ice cream and refreeze it. Not terrible and better than no bastani. I just had black sesame and toasted coconut ice cream and it was so grand. Sometimes I dream of having a weird ice cream truck. It is only a dream because people do not appreciate weirdness, they appreciate vanilla and chocolate. The biggest scam is Superman ice cream, which is just vanilla with a bunch of coloring in it, what a crock. As a child I favored the bubble gum ice cream, personally, or cookies and creme. Anyway. A weird ice cream truck. How fun would that be? I would like it to play some fun music. What is that ice cream music, anyway? It sounds like a music box. How do they do it? I googled and I got noise. It's a mystery. That's okay. Although apparently you can play theremin music through the ice cream truck. Can you imagine? Your pal playing the piano part of Saint-Saƫns' "The Swan" on a Casio keyboard while the cello part is on the theremin?
Hmm, hmm, hmm! Let me immerse myself in my ice cream dream.
I'm forever seeing tweets and retweets about how terrible it is that we went from everyone having their own website or blog or what have you and merged to the "infinite scroll" models of social media. So I decided that I would stop scrolling infinitely for the time being. One day in and I feel freed from the chains that have bound me. I have never done so much on a Monday, and I ain't even do all that much.
Currently I am reading this delightful book from the 1930's - 1933, to be exact - full of amusements to construct and they make me Absolutely Wild. I am just thrilled about most of the things in this book. When I was a kid, I think the most exciting thing project-wise to make was a potato clock or a clubhouse. This book has things like "Make a kite shaped like a boy! The kite also whistles!" and "Build a huge brontosaurus! Here's how!" and "Here's how to make a sailing skiff!", which is all I want in the world. When I was a kid and would read Tom Sawyer and they'd take their little raft to the island? That was my dream. (I think that happened. Right? I haven't read that book in a while.) So far I have NOT built a sailing skiff, but there are a couple of things that I would like to try. One of them is "making a hectograph", in the chapter on Amateur Journalism. Apparently a hectograph is just making a gelatin plate? I had to call my Printmaking professor from undergrad and ask. I also read Kim Herringe's blog on making gelatin plates - the recipe in this book calls for sugar for some reason, and this blog recipe does not, so I'm wondering what difference the sugar makes. I was thinking that if the hectograph was good for printing a kid's one-page newspaper, that maybe I could experiment with using it to print the one-page mini-zines. Then I wouldn't have to make photocopies. Although I did get my student ID today, so...I should go make photocopies because having a student ID means I can load money on my card and not worry about not having any change. I think I can also take the bus for free?!? Maybe I will make a gelatin plate today. |
AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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