My San Francisco

I was born in San Francisco and lived all my life within an hour’s drive of The City (as Bay Area natives call it) till I moved to to the Northwest in 1997. I never lived in San Francisco itself after my first six weeks in an incubator there, but it always felt like my city, and I’m protective of it and of my memories of its most beautiful and special places.

I love Coit Tower—the WPA-era murals inside it, the views of the bay and San Francisco from its apex, even the shape of the building itself. I remember when Union Square still looked like it does in Francis Ford Coppola’s great thriller, “The Conversation.” As a child, my mother and I would go into The City at Christmastime to stare at the gorgeous windows around Union Square and visit the City of Paris building (demolished by Neiman-Marcus in 1981, the bastards), a lovely beaux-arts-style landmark. We filled our tummies on the great soups at Salmagundi on Geary Street before seeing Peter Donat or Philip Anglim on stage at ACT across the street, and I savored the thick coffee milkshakes at Bill’s Place on Clement Street. Years later I went back to Clement to spend endless happy hours browsing art and design ideas at Green Apple Books.

During my college years I loved dancing at the I-Beam in the Haight (as did Rock Hudson when he was in town) and shopping for neon plastic sunglasses, watches and funky New Wave everything at the Headlines stores on Polk Street and Castro Street, each nestled among sex shops and leather bars and populated with adorable twinks. During the nineties I got married in the exquisite San Francisco City Hall building (Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio did the same thing in the 1950s), and had some of the best meals of my life at Greens, the famous vegetarian restaurant in the Marina district. I loved having afternoon tea in the Fairmont’s Cirque Room to celebrate a special occasion, or meeting friends in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel before showing them around my favorite parts of the city.

I even miss freezing my tuchis up at the Marin Headlands just across the Golden Gate Bridge and looking down at spectacular views of San Francisco (please, don’t ever call my city Frisco) while gusts of cold wind blew my hair straight back and turned my ears first red, then white with cold. (And that was in the summer; in winter it felt positively polar up there.) I wish I could duck into the Musée Mechanique just below Cliff House and enjoy 80-year-old mechanical fortune tellers and player pianos for a few bucks’ worth of quarters again, but it’s moved to Pier 45 at Fisherman's Wharf. I'm glad it still exists, but in its old location, under the boardwalk, it seemed so pleasingly down-at-the-heels. Fisherman's Wharf, while no longer as skanky a place as I knew (and avoided) from childhood, still boasts enough seedy spots to remind me why I've never liked it.

One of my favorite (and most frequent) San Francisco destinations over the years was Golden Gate Park, from its lakes to the elegant glass domed Conservatory of Flowers (one of the world’s largest) to the meadows full of tiny daisies. My father took me there with VW-loads of his hippie friends in the 1960s when I was very small. I remember passing through the Haight-Ashbury district to get there in the late sixties and early seventies and knowing even as a little child that the Haight, and the U.C. Berkeley campus, which my father also took me to, were the places to find hippie culture. (My parents were both students at Cal when they met, and my mom followed the more traditional Cal values while my father took the other road.) I think our sojourns to the epicenters of the counterculture were his attempts at balancing out what he thought was his daughter’s overly mainstream, white-bread, suburban world.

I always felt out of place when visiting my father and hanging out with his scruffy friends during my infrequent visits with him. I felt weird because of my comparative lack of weirdness among these people. At least during Dad’s visits we were were often hanging out in attractive city parks full of impressive things to see and interesting people to gawp at. My father wanted me to see hairy, lefty urban culture as an antidote to what he saw as sleepy, conservative, stultifying suburban values. Sadly, he and his friends and their choices emphasized all the scarier aspects of hippie culture instead of showing me the fresher, freer, more positive aspects. They may have loved countercultural values for their anti-war, anti-establishment elements, and I can admire those aspects, too, at a nearly forty-year remove from the experience. But what I saw and shrank from even as a very tiny child were physically dirty folks with stoned expressions who made a lot of jokes about sex that they thought I didn’t understand, and a father who picked up stray hitchhikers and invited them into his succession of coughing VW Beetles while he drove down foggy streets on dark nights whether I was in the car or not.

Dad also took me to graveyards for picnics occasionally; this scared me at the time, but I wonder whether my own penchant for old cemeteries grew out of these odd al fresco afternoons. On my few overnight visits, Dad thought it funny to have me sleep on a daybed made up under a bookcase that featured a real human skull as a decorative element. My father and his friends had no clue what was appropriate behavior around a small child, listened to me only sporadically and then laughed at whatever I said without explaining to me why my opinions or questions were so funny. I felt lonely among them, and just as much a misfit among hippies as I did around the suburban folks I grew up among.

But I always loved visiting Golden Gate Park, whether with my dad and his deadhead pals, with my beloved uncle on a trip to the Steinhart Aquarium, or with my mom on our way to the de Young Museum. The Japanese Tea Garden had (and still has) koi ponds, melt-in-your-mouth almond cookies and an impossibly steep Japanese bridge to climb, and there were free opera and band concerts at the band shell between the aquarium and the de Young. I enjoyed the whole park, but oh, how I loved the de Young. That’s where I first saw King Tut’s golden mummy case, treasures from the time of of Alexander the Great, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and so many important visiting exhibitions. Even when there wasn’t a blockbuster show there, the de Young was like a visual sampler platter of art, craft and design through the ages. Like other grand old art collections in grand old buildings around the country, one found rooms full of elegant furniture, hallways lined with vitrines stocked with porcelain and fine silver pieces, small portraits and sweeping landscapes, all in a building that had a history and a personality of its own.

Visiting the de Young felt kind of like stepping into an eccentric old aunt’s mansion, but one built in a distinctly Californian style, not like the darker, heavier mansions-based art museums of the East Coast (which I’ll admit I also love). When I was little, the best part for me was going into the central hall lined with suits of armor and banners. It was like a grand baronial space, a dramatic fantasy place where I stepped out of time. The museum was welcoming and of its time, and I loved it.

The de Young that I loved so was a gracious Spanish-style building built in 1919 with a lovely tower built in 1921. It had a simple stucco exterior and flanked by palm trees and a stood behind a pond. Its style was very Californian. A number of buildings on the Mills College campus in nearby Oakland, including my beautiful dormitory, Olney Hall, were built in the same simple Californian stucco, beam and tile-roofed architectural style around the same time. This 1910s and '20s Californian version of the Spanish style has always appealed to me as carrying a number of the elements and proportions found in the Arts & Crafts bungalows built at the time while also incorporating some of the state’s Spanish mission and rancho past. Architect Julia Morgan (most famous for designing the much grander Hearst Castle) used it to good effect in several buildings on the Mills College campus, including the Margaret Carnegie Library, where I worked part-time in the Albert M. Bender Rare Book Room during all four of my years at Mills. This style is unpretentious and it fits into the Californian landscape, and even when built on a grand scale, its simplicity keeps it from overwhelming its occupants. It was a lovely and elegant complement to the art of the de Young.

And now it’s gone.

The huge Loma Prieta earthquake of October 1989 damaged the de Young so profoundly that it was eventually found seismically unsafe. Retrofitting the building didn’t make financial sense to San Francisco voters, and in 1998 they voted to demolish it and replace it. It was torn down and the new de Young’s construction began in 2001. And then some lurking evil force settled into the brains of those in charge of the new design like a malevolent worm. It somehow ate away at their good sense and at any desire they might once have had to create a welcoming public space that both enhanced the art-viewing experience and invited the visitor to linger and appreciate the space itself. Gone were gracious details, human-scaled spaces, architectural echoes of the region’s design history or cultural history, and architectural context for historical pieces. The museum’s designers, architects, directors and private funders instead described the old de Young’s design with sneers and scorn. They couldn’t wait to rip it down and erase any visual reminders of it, save the palm trees that used to surround it. Considering it outdated, tired and ugly, they stated that their new building design sought "to communicate diversity; it is an embodiment of the open-ended concept of art fostered by the museum. It expresses the distinctiveness of different cultures and, at the same time, it is a place of common ground, where diversity meets and intersects, where otherwise hidden kinships between divergent cultural forms become visible and tangible."

Oh yeah? Could have fooled me. It’s the ugliest museum I have ever seen.

I’ll write more about it soon.

I'm a Living Dickens Character!

This week I learned that Charles Dickens invented me in 1872! I had no idea. Look, I have proof: click here.

I feel so much more important now. It’s wonderful to learn that I’m a figment of my favorite novelist’s imagination. I suppose this means I must take up wearing crinolines and corsets, speak in dulcet-toned King's English all the time and faint more often. Well, if it means enjoying carriage rides through London, attending regular afternoon tea parties, wearing Victorian hats and going on long walks through Dickens’ imagination, perhaps it’s worth it.

Maybe I'm Crazy

Okay, so I’m slow. I only just caught on to Gnarls Barkley’s music. I’d heard and enjoyed “Crazy” before, but somehow my ears really opened up to it last week. I’ve been listening to them a lot and enjoying their videos, which are so clever and cool, on You Tube. I love their wonderful inkblot video.

I think Cee-Lo’s vocals are gorgeous; he has a smooth Motown-style falsetto that sounds warm and perfectly natural, not forced like some do, and Danger Mouse's production is delicious. Their rhythms are totally infectious and they’ve got a lovely gospel thing going on, too. Tasty. I love their sense of humor, too; Cee-Lo dressed like Darth Vader at the 2006 MTV Movie Awards, they dressed like droogs from “A Clockwork Orange” for other photos. My favorite is this spot-on "Napoleon Dynamite" send-up.

“Crazy” songs seem to work for me. I love Seal’s early hit “Crazy” (and his later acoustic version of it), and of course Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” is perfection. Willie Nelson made something like $50 for writing that song, and Patsy’s version went on to become the all-time top jukebox single. With reason. Willie’s versions are beautiful too, much softer, as if he’s accepted that his love is a hopeless cause. Patsy seems unconvinced that it was really so crazy to fall in love; Patsy's version of the song is so addictive because when she sings it, her torch still burns so brightly. Her head knows it’s crazy, but her heart still hopes. “The heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of.”

I'll write more on museums soon. In the meantime, I hope you're enjoying the holiday season and have kind, funny, open-hearted people to spend it with. I wish you peace and happiness, now and always.

Wowed by Denver's Splendid Art Museum

Last month I visited Denver for the first time, and was wowed by the fabulous weather (sunny and 72 degrees in November!), the inviting and attractive mix of historical and brand-new architecture, the friendly locals, the city’s progressive vibe, and, especially, by the Denver Art Museum, which I can now call one of my favorite regional museums in the country.

San Francisco’s De Young Museum and the Seattle Art Museum were both renovated recently at enormous expense with mixed results. In contrast, the money, thought and care Denver has poured into the expansion of its most important art museum is successful on many levels. This is primarily because DAM's designers and curators never forgot that the point of having an art museum is to create a positive, exciting and enriching environment for all sorts of people that helps them to enjoy, understand and grow more intimately acquainted with art.

A great civic building should not be an impressive but intimidatingly impersonal temple to the arts that sets the work on display apart from humanity, only to make people feel smaller, less connected and more confused as a result. Often, proponents of modern architecture dedicated to the arts take the view that a fresh, modern approach requires that the building and the art experienced within it must be spare, cold, harsh and huge. I find that such buildings (and such viewpoints) dwarf the soul and undermine both the art and the viewers’ experiences of the art. Those of us who prefer a warmer, more human (and more humane) arts experience are usually left clinging to the old ways and the old styles of display and design if we want to enjoy artworks in an atmosphere that isn’t devoid of charm or feeling. While I love many antique and classic architectural styles and can derive great pleasure from viewing artworks housed in them, I can also take pleasure in the clean lines, fresh perspectives and bold breaks with the past that modernity has to offer. That is, I can enjoy them if the purpose of the building and the needs of its visitors (and appropriate display of its contents) are all taken into consideration as well.

There are alternatives to the bleak, forbidding, humorless and sometimes artistically anorexic big-box museums popping up like pox around the world. San Francisco has the Museum of Modern Art, which is massive and impressive but broken up into digestible chunks of architectural space so that one can enjoy soaring curves and architectural leaps toward the sky from within the building without feeling dwarfed and swallowed by it. The Bellevue Arts Museum has grand vertical spaces in its entry hall, but the floorspace isn’t overwhelmingly large, and the mix of colors, windows, materials and artworks in the space keeps it from being too intimidating. Indeed, most of the museum is broken up into small galleries that allow the primarily intimately-scaled works they feature to be enjoyed without feeling lost or dwarfed by an overscaled, overly bright display space.

When I saw photographs of the Denver Art Museum’s new Hamilton Building I was at first disappointed. The building, which houses about half of the museum’s holdings (the rest are in the more sedate building across the street and connected to the Hamilton Building by a skybridge), was meant by architect Daniel Libeskind to imply the craggy triangular shapes of the Rocky Mountains. This is a respectful nod to the region’s geography, but to me it looked in photographs like a colossal pile of broken glass with huge spikes jutting out into the surrounding plaza in what I feared would be an intimidating fashion. I expected to find it as numbingly offputting as I find Rem Koolhaas’ design for the Seattle Public Library, which looms menacingly over downtown Seattle in sharp, cold, übergeometric fashion.

I find the Seattle Public Library's geometric shapes aggressively, threateningly angular, completely counter to anything found in nature, oversized and overscale, and too unyielding in style and material. When my daughter visited it shortly after it opened, she noted that even its children's section features hard, cold, unwelcoming surfaces and furnishings. Koolhaas’s library, so roundly praised by professional architects, feels claustrophobic to me despite all its glass; the large scale of the diamond-shaped metal grid covering the building makes me feel like a bug crushed beneath a window screen when I am inside the building. The library is oddly scaled and full of unusable spaces yet lacking in enough room to give those browsing the book stacks space to amble and view the books without feeling rather squashed. The building has been praised for bringing nature inside, but I find this laughable. The unattractive and half-dead grasses around and inside the building look weedy, and the grass-patterned carpeting inside only makes the rest of the interior look that much more divorced from nature and natural forms, most importantly including human beings, whose presence within the pile of offset oddly-angled glass blocks seems to be an afterthought. Rather than being a welcoming place in which to study, rest, read, browse, learn and renew, the place has all the welcoming cheer of an airport terminal. Less, actually; many airports, including Seattle’s, are quite full of friendly, inviting public artworks, from inlaid metal salmon swimming along one terminal’s floors to columns covered in intricate mosaic designs to exceptionally pretty stained glass windows that evoke Northwest Indian designs and stories.

But I digress. Yes, the Denver Art Museum’s spiky glass hull does loom a bit over visitors, but it sits in a splendid plaza, a welcoming public space bordered by an appealing glass multiuse building as well as by a practical and lovely modern library complex composed of buildings that reminded me of castles, towers and Monopoly houses, among other pleasing simple shapes. There is a giant sculpture of two cattle next to the museum, "Scottish Angus Cow and Calf" by Dan Ostermiller, which was voted the “Best Climbable Art" by locals, and an enormous Claes Oldenburg sculpture of a dustpan and broom right out front; it is hard not to smile when viewing either of these monumental yet whimsical works. Upon viewing DAM in its architectural context, one gets an immediate impression that those responsible for designing, making and presenting this plaza had not only panache and vision, but also well-developed senses of humor. A major arts center that doesn’t take itself too seriously? How refreshing!

Once inside DAM, the boldly scaled building is broken into component spaces that work with each other seamlessly, giving a sense of an inviting multitude of options without overwhelming the visitor and making her feel insignificant. Ceilings are dropped and comfy yet modern chairs are sized for humans. From the main floor’s small café, one can sit and admire the quirky furnishings that make up several relaxed conversation areas, view the main entrance, the ticket-purchasing area, get a glimpse into the well-stocked gift shop through a triangle of glass and watch a slideshow of images of artworks through another triangular cut-out in a wall. It’s easy to get one’s bearings at a glance and feel that one’s immediate needs have been considered and are easy to fulfill: snacks here, tickets there, comfy conversation area here, gift shop there, stairs to the special exhibition there, views out into the inviting plaza here.

Once upstairs, one finds generous exhibition spaces and many delightful resting spots, small libraries and fascinating exhibits explaining art conservation methods incorporating beautiful pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. There are attractive and comfortable areas for rest and research scattered everywhere, each different and appropriate to the style and content of the gallery. Child-friendly spaces attract people of all ages with interactive lights and activities. Colorfully painted walls act as invigorating backdrops that make artworks pop, a welcome alternative to the sterile and generic white or grey galleries favored at some newly minted museums. The museum is proud of its gallery of Western art, which I expected to find as uninspiring and hackneyed as an old episode of “Bonanza.” Boy, was I wrong. It housed my favorite works in the museum, a series of twenty 12x12-inch paintings of different grasses by Karen Kitchel, in addition to excellent paintings of cowboys, Indians and animals and the expected Frederick Remington horse-and-cowboy sculptures and paintings (which are actually quite impressive).

Just beyond the Western gallery is the skybridge to DAM’s other building, which houses an imposing and impressive gallery of Native American/Indian/First People’s artworks including masks, paintings, sculptures and fiber art. There was also a visiting exhibition of color field paintings that left me unmoved, but which was full of important works by influential artists, few of whom I like. Still, it was an appropriate and important juxtaposition to the rest of the museum’s holdings and to the other main visiting show at the time, an assortment of works of decorative art (from chandeliers to dishes to tapestries) on loan from Paris titled "Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures from the Louvre."

The scale, the high quality of the artworks in the collection, the breadth of work on display, the excellent libraries and reference rooms scattered about, the attractive and appropriate design of the galleries, and the awareness of the museum’s planners regarding how the museum fits into its metropolitan surroundings both physically and metaphorically all work together to make the Denver Art Museum a great success aesthetically and culturally for people of any artistic persuasion, be it traditional or minimalist, abstract or figurative. The restaurants and gift shops are even well thought out, as are the sizes and layouts of the public spaces. Denver has a lot going for it that makes it worth a visit, but for me, just having another chance to enjoy DAM (and to see the wonderful 40-foot-tall blue bear sculpture at the Colorado Convention Center) will be worth the trip.

LauraGrey.com is Now Online

Laura Grey Fine Arts is online at www.lauragrey.com. Please take a look; from there you can read artist's statements, link to online galleries, find contact and biographical information, and visit this blog.

Museumania!

Over the past six months I’ve had the good fortune to visit eight important regional art museums in the West and Northwest. This summer I entered the recently reborn and outwardly Azkaban-like de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park only to find that this new bunker of a building (complete with looming guard tower) has absolutely none of the charm and grace of the old, Spanish style de Young I spent so many happy hours in, which was devastated by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The new de Young has many minimalists in an ecstatic thrall; I loathed its exterior as I never have any museum before or since. It has won prizes for accessibility, which is commendable, but these photos meant to celebrate it show how stark and unwelcoming its courtyard is. There were some pleasing surprises inside, but the architecture got in the way of the art more than once, even once inside its hideous walls.

The delightful San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), on the other hand, is bold and modern, yet it offers both a nod to the art historical past (its graphic black and white horizontal lines echo those of Siena's cathedral) and the interior provides an attractive yet unobtrusive backdrop to any art displayed within its walls. Its architecture, inside and out, is as big and beautiful a success as the de Young’s is a failure.

A highlight of my pilgrimage through the museums of the West was the Portland Art Museum. This was due less to the museum itself (which is a lovely place) than to the excitement of seeing some of my favorite 17th century Dutch masterpieces in the “Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam” show. The exhibition was breathtaking. I haven’t seen so many perfectly executed small masterpieces in one place since I last visited my favorite American shrines to art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (home to the most wonderful array of John Singer Sargent portraits anywhere) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. At PAM I saw one exquisite work after another by some of my favorite artists working during my favorite era in one of my favorite locations on earth. I was dumbstruck by the perfection of the technique of artist after artist. I found that the delicacy and immediacy of the Rembrandt etchings on display rendered them even more touching than the Rembrandt paintings they featured, and when I got to one of my favorite Frans Hals portraits, I wept for the sheer joy of seeing it again.

In August I ventured up to British Columbia and enjoyed the lovely but relatively small Vancouver Art Gallery. With only about 9,000 works of art in the collection, it is still the grandest art museum in the city though it has just a tiny fraction of number of pieces found in San Francisco or Seattle. Vancouver staged a pleasing traveling show, “Monet to Dalí: Modern Masters from the Cleveland Museum of Art.” There were no standout masterpieces to take my breath away; it was a useful overview for comparing and contrasting various important artists' styles and influence, but their greatest work wasn't on display. It was no blockbuster.

I quite enjoyed the Bellevue Art Museum’s extensive and beautifully curated show titled “Raymond Loewy: Designs for a Consumer Culture” which displayed the work of the brilliant and influential mid-20th century industrial designer. The transformation of BAM from another pleasant midlevel regional art museum to a showcase for craft and design as well as “fine art” over the past few years has been very successful artistically, even if their endless financial woes don’t ever seem to ebb completely. I give them kudos for coming up with some startlingly inventive and beautiful shows featuring calligraphy, beadwork, textiles, woodwork and assemblage, among other offerings.

Seattle’s Frye Museum always provides a quirky mix of fresh new, sometimes painfully in-your-face or self-conscious pieces and delicious little gems. During the ten years I’ve been going there, the museum has been consistently original and unusual in the artists it has chosen to showcase. Some I can’t stand, others amuse and delight me. They’ve had some particularly exciting and interesting photography shows over the years, and offered a terrific survey of comic strip art that I still remember years after the fact. Their permanent collection of primarily mid-19th century Mitteleuropean art bequeathed by the founders of the museum is mostly sedate and often academic, but still quite pretty. It includes a dark, erotically-charged and dangerous-seeming painting by Franz von Stuck, “Sin” (“Die Suende”) that’s a real crowd pleaser. It is rehung and reimagined in various forms for different shows nearly every year.

This past week I made it to the Seattle Art Museum, which reopened six months ago after a major expansion and a billion (with a B) dollars worth of new acquisitions. I found some of it very successful, and some quite disappointing. It is huge now, and I was barely able to see a third of it in the two hours I spent there. I plan to return in December to see the second half of the very enjoyable two-part show called “Japan Envisions the West” and to try to get into all the galleries I didn’t even glance into. I should spend more time there before I presume to grade how successful it is over all. I’m afraid it was much less impressive, appealing or approachable than the Denver Art Museum’s dramatic new Hamilton Building, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and opened to the public a year ago. I found it at first off-puttingly spiky from the outside, but I was captivated by the giant Claes Oldenburg broom and dustpan sculpture out front and have so many positive things to say about all they did right inside. (I've loved Oldenburg since I was six.) And I will say those positive things here, very soon. Over the coming weeks I plan to write a little more about my experiences in each of these museums. Stay tuned. And don't forget to check out my own artworks at www.lauragrey.com.

A Horrible Night/A Wonderful Night

My friend Gordon is in a local hospital’s intensive care unit tonight; he had a motorcycle accident a few hours ago and was found bleeding and in shock. He has several serious injuries that required surgery and he lost a lot of blood, but it looks like he’s going to come through his ordeal well, though it will take time. Being healthy, young, smart enough to wear good protective gear and lucky enough to be taken to a hospital with a fine trauma team saved Gordon’s life. We were so very scared, and are so incredibly grateful.

It was a horrible night for Gordon: his life was nearly snatched from him. He was left with new scars and major injuries that will take a while to heal. And it was a wonderful night for Gordon: he lives, and his friends are all reminded how lucky we are to have him among us and how important it is that he know how we feel. We are all grateful that Gordon has a good life to come back to after peeking over the precarious ledge between life and death.

Gordon is a kind, generous, talented young man, the sort of instantly likeable fellow who brightens a room with his energy, brains and good humor. He appreciates all he has and all others do to help him. He regularly goes out of his way to enrich others’ lives. When we heard of his accident tonight, we had a few very worried hours till we learned that it looks like he’ll come through it all well. People as determined as he is to share their talents and kindness with others are rare, and we thank the doctors and nurses who saved his life tonight.

My friend's very close call has reminded me again how fragile life is, and how blessed we are to have new chances every day to love, to give, to lighten someone’s load, to forgive, to ask forgiveness, to be grateful. We have so many opportunities to do favors, bring comfort, make things better or make sure others know what they mean to us. Each day brings new chances to use our power for good. But our days here don't go on forever; we need to live our lives well today, not wait for next week or next year to make our days count or make our appreciation known to others. Gordon knows these things, and I’m lucky to know him. I am so grateful that he’ll be sticking around. We can really use a guy like him in this weary old world.

Making Friends While Making Art

I'm so jazzed; very soon I'll be starting a new art open house series at the Ground Zero Teen Center in Bellevue. It's a great, welcoming place for teens to gather after school. The center is housed in what used to be a church, with funky corners and angles in unexpected places, and there's a friendly, laid-back, all-inclusive vibe. It's run on a shoestring, but the people in charge do a great job and set a welcoming but low-key tone. It'll be lovely to work with them and the kids.

Ground Zero is a very musical place. There are frequent concerts and people take music lessons there (my daughter goes there for electric guitar lessons with terrific local musician Amy Stolzenbach). There's often music wafting out the doors, a TV droning in the back room, a friendly dog or two wandering through the building and greeting anyone and everyone, and a snack waiting for hungry teens who wander in after school. Even the bathrooms are places of free expression; walls are covered in chalkboard paint and big sticks of sidewalk chalk invite people to draw or write what they feel. They have free practice rooms available for kids with bands to use, and they serve a big dinner once a week. There are posters everywhere reminding people that it's a place of tolerance, respect and kindness, and materials are prominently posted to help kids find information and people to talk to if they're having troubles. It's clear that there are people ready to help kids move in the right direction if they get lost. It feels safe and homey.

The center's walls have a few examples of teen art that crackle with energy and show how much their creators wanted to express what they feel through making something with their hearts and hands. Teens are often spilling over with a hunger to put their feelings into some positive form. I can't wait to see what they come up with during my time with them.

During October I expect to start drop-in art clinic afternoons. I'll bring in a different assortment of art supplies and cool materials the kids may not have easy access to elsewhere, and I'll share a variety of my own works and lots of other sources of inspiration and ideas. Sometimes I'll offer up illustrations of classic and important pieces, and if they're up for it we can talk about what makes them important and whether we actually like them or not. But I also want to bring in examples of art that we take for granted, stuff we find on clothing and packaging and magazines, and point out that they're works of art, too. I'll ask them to share what they find beautiful, and to talk about art that speaks to us even when we find it ugly. I'll work on something in real time, and show them what I'm up to, see what ideas they have, and we can talk about what works for us and what doesn't, how to work around what feel like artistic weaknesses or restrictions, and what is meaningful to them.

My daughter Lily creates intricate, glorious digital artworks with Photoshop. She'll be bringing in examples of her work, too, to spark discussion and to broaden our teen allure. She'll be my trusty sidekick, helping me set things up, making sure everybody's got what they need, and making our space more approachable; someone my age sitting alone at a table with a bunch of funky art supplies might not be as appealing to teens without another actual teen showing interest. Lily's comfortable working in many media, too, so she and I can dive in each week to break the ice.

If kids have no interest in my ideas for the day, that's absolutely fine; the last thing they need is for me to impose my visions on them or make them feel like they have to do things a certain way. I don't want to lecture or talk my way through the whole thing, just to make it easier for them to jump in and try things, get new ideas, see what gets other people excited and ask themselves what they find beautiful or meaningful. So often students feel forced to mimic other people's work or accept other people's beliefs and ideas at face value instead of asking themselves what they truly believe, what matters most, and what they can give to the world and feel good about. I want to help them to feel safe exploring these ideas. We all need to be reminded that beauty comes in many forms, and that our work doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful.

Ooga Chakka

I have a brilliant idea. Let's create a new musical genre based on the opening to the song "Hooked on a Feeling." Yeah, a whole branch of popular music that incorporates the chant "Ooga chakka, ooga, ooga, ooga chakka" in the background of any song, old or new, from Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" to Amy Winehouse's "Rehab." (Try it; it works.) If you're really daring, make an ubercheesy video of yourself acting as stupid as humanly possible, heavy on the ooga chakkas. C'mon, baby, I dare you. Look, it worked for David Hasselhoff.

Memento mori

My mind and hands have been overflowing with new art ideas, techniques, materials and styles this year; it’s been an exciting and productive, if often challenging, year. I’ve engaged in some old artistic pleasures, such as making miniature pencil and pen drawings based on historical portraits and fashioning a few delicate pieces of jewelry, but I’ve also pushed myself in entirely new directions. I’ve done a lot of work with metal mesh and wire constructions; they run the gamut from looking like identifiable sea creatures to being completely conceptual abstract pieces based on the study of physics. (You can click through to a gallery of my recent pieces above.) I’ve done pieces that look like billowing curtains and shimmering bubbles, and brought my love of jewels and detail out of the world of jewelry by wiring gems and metal findings around, over and through canvas. I’ve built up assemblages of bits of twig, watch parts, pressed flowers, layers of wasp nests and phrases from encyclopedia pages, some showing a sort of strutting, geometric confidence and others twinkling shyly.

My work has become much more tactile and textural, sometimes invitingly and sometimes in a more prickly way. My calligraphy series of metal mesh and wire on canvas pieces includes shapes that to me evoke a meeting between the landscapes of Tim Burton and Dr. Seuss, while my wasp (vespa) series is softer, mostly featuring the undulating lines created by a colony of wasps as they built an extraordinary striped paper nest. The gift of the nest was a surprise from a friend, and its texture, unevenness and the perfection of its imperfections have been wonderfully inspiring.

I’ve found another favorite source of inspiration this year in old pocket watch innards, small cogs and wheels, and delicate old watch faces. I’ve been gathering them for some time, and I find them physically pleasing for their meticulous and intricate construction and tininess. But I love them just as much because, cold little mechanical devices that they once were, they were also the intimate possessions of real, warm, living people, most now cold and dead, who relied on them to order their time and make sense of their days. Tiny, clicking, jeweled machines rested in their hands, around their wrists next to to their beating pulses, in their breast pockets, against their hips.

Now their watches are in pieces, showing parts of themselves that their long-dead, long-term owners never saw. They remind me of Dutch memento mori paintings, still lifes that included exquisite renditions of flowers covered in reflective droplets of dew, insects, hour glasses, skulls and ripe fruit and watches. Each lovely item, carefully collected and displayed, acted as a reminder that life is fleeting, that all is vanity, that even the most luscious peach or the most perfect tulip will someday wither, and that we must appreciate them today, but also keep in mind what is really lasting and what really matters. They tell us that the fragility of beauty makes it more precious, and that this is a good thing.

Memento mori pieces are sometimes seen with a Calvinist eye as dark reminders to repent and put away the things of this world. I think this view is mistaken, that they are actually delicate reminders to treasure each day and savor each blessing. The loveliest way I can think of to describe this view is to quote Swinburne’s poem “The Garden of Proserpine”:

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

These lines also happen to have been quoted and set to music by my mother’s friend of many years, Owen Goldsmith, a composer and arranger of great subtlety whose choral works are so painfully beautiful they invariably make me cry. Owen was a music director at Livermore High School when I was a tiny child, and he went on to a very successful career as a composer of choral works. Thousands of students have sung his works in concerts and competitions over the past forty years.

When I was little, my mother, who was a remarkable pianist, was often the first person to play Owen’s compositions after Owen himself; he would ask her over to play them for him so that he could hear them fresh from another pair of hands, and I was usually there, too, sitting on the floor reading his books of Charles Addams or Pogo comics in the room as his pieces hit the air. My mother also had a powerful and lyrical soprano voice, and she was often the first to sing his songs as well. Now I wish that I had recordings of those magical times; I remember hearing her play and sing them many times at home when I was a child, and I still play the pieces myself from old photostatic copies of the manuscripts, though not with her fluency at the piano.

I do have a recording of my mother and me singing his piece, Cleavings, which was comprised of three short songs, including the one above, about 25 years ago. I listened to my recording again last month, and immediately burst into tears for its beauty, for the pleasure of sharing it with my mother, for the way her voice and mine blended so sweetly, for the loss of her, her talents and her own passion for music and art. That bittersweetness is why we remember that death comes for us all: “memento mori” means “remember death” but implies “treasure life.”

Schrödinger's Cat Toy & Luminiferous Ether

It's time for new art! Since I last posted a link to photos of my latest artworks here in February, I've been feverishly creating a few dozen new pieces; you can take a peek at them by clicking on the photo above and going to my online gallery.

I've started several new series this year; samples from each series are posted. Most of the new works fall into one of four categories: one is inspired by sealife, a second by calligraphy, another by poetry, and the biggest new series is inspired by the world of physics. More paintings and assemblages will be posted soon. Stay tuned!

Everything Is Illuminated

When Jonathan Safran Foer's book Everything Is Illuminated came out a few years ago, I read reviews of it and peeked at the book a few times, but I didn't sit down with the novel and really give it my attention. It looked like fun, but I could see why some reviewers found it too gimicky or cute with its quirky and surprising use of words as illustrations, which some found distracted them from the story. When I heard that one of my favorite actors, Liev Schreiber, was adapting and directing a film version of the story, I was delighted; he's a talented, versatile actor and his interviews are witty, self-deprecating and entertaining. I figured he would bring something fresh and original to the story. The result was lovelier, funnier and more touching than I imagined it would be, and with this single film his place in my heart as a favorite director as well as a fine actor is now permanent.

The film version of Everything is Illuminated stars Elijah Wood, who plays Jonathan Safran Foer, the writer of the novel and the fictionalized main character. Wood is well cast; his performance is appropriately odd and moving, and his discomfort in the world as well as in his own skin are palpable and amusing. A stranger in a strange land, he is an American Jew who travels to Ukraine to see where his late grandfather lived before the Holocaust and to try to meet the woman who saved his grandfather from death. The result is one of the funniest and most touching road pictures I've seen. Jonathan's awkwardness, anxiety and obsessiveness are strangely compelling, and Elijah Wood's performance is certainly worth seeing.

However, the performance that steals the picture and makes me laugh out loud in astonished delight is by the wonderful Ukrainian actor and singer Eugene Hutz. The long-faced Hutz is also the front man for a band called Gogol Bordello, whose music sounds like a fabulous conglomeration of klezmer tunes, gypsy folk music and punk. British comedian Phill Jupitus describes this gypsy punk band as "a bit like The Clash having a fight with The Pogues in Eastern Europe." Their biggest hit, "Start Wearing Purple," plays out the movie during the final credits, and it is as startlingly, infectiously surprising and life-affirming as the film before it. The juxtaposition of amusingly jaded lyrics with drunken wedding-party-style singing fits the feel of the movie perfectly in true traditional Eastern European fashion: life is hard, my youth will vanish and my sanity will follow, so let's start living right now!

Hutz plays Alex, a Ukraininan in his 20s who lives at home with his parents, his grandfather, and his grandfather's beloved dog, Sammy Davis Junior Junior. (Yes, two juniors.) His father's company gives half-assed tours to American Jews touring the Ukraine seeking connection with their lost ancestors. Alex acts as translator and runs interference between his cranky old grandfather, who insists that he is blind but who chauffers confused tourists unwillingly in a run-down compact car, Sammy Davis Junior Junior at his side. Alex has supreme confidence in his style and brilliance and, gangly and ridiculous though he may be in his track suit and attempts at American-style bling, he is convinced of his extraordinary sex appeal. And somehow, like Tim Curry dressed in Transylvanian drag in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, his confidence and lust for life make him sexy. To watch this lanky young man saunter down the street in a scene that parodies the opening to Saturday Night Fever, calling out to admiring passersby and telling you what a premium dancer he is, you can believe that he really is as "premium" as he believes himself to be.

The adventures shared by Alex, his grandfather, Sammy the dog and "Jonfen," as Alex calls Jonathan, are fun and surprising, but also ultimately meaningful and moving, to us as well as to them. Actor Liev Schreiber brings a sense of humor and decency to many of his roles; he has a great talent for making his characters so real, so in-the-moment, that any audience would be hard pressed not to be touched by the stories of the men he plays in movies like A Walk on the Moon (one of my favorites) and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. In Everything Is Illuminated he shows us that he has the same gift for creating a whole film that he has for creating a compelling character.

A Sampling of My Recent Artworks

At last, I can offer you a virtual gallery of my artworks. Most of the pieces in my online gallery were created over the past year, but I've included a few older favorites as well.

Since last summer, I've turned my focus back toward my lifelong love of creating art and away from words. Of course, I still love delicious writing and I feel sad not to have kept up my blog, but rather than turn my thoughts and energies outward to share with others, I've been turning them inward, asking myself big questions, and expressing my visions, thoughts and hopes with imagery rather than text.

While I still enjoy drawing and doing detailed watercolors, I've recently delighted in branching out into assemblages and working with three-dimensional forms displayed on canvas. It's fun to tweak the idea that art on canvas is more valuable, more genuine, or finer art than works created on paper or other arts often considered to be lesser pieces because they come from the world of handicraft rather than from the fine arts universe.

I enjoy the way balance and negative space become so important in assemblage and collage. My delight in assembling these little pieces is an outgrowth of my love for creating small, intimate artworks and crafts pieces that invite the viewer to get close and share the physical space in which the artwork is displayed. In the past I made a lot of jewelry because I enjoyed the idea of wearable art that the wearer could play with, notice and handle more than pieces that hang on walls or sit on mantels. Jewelry becomes part of the owner's personal physical space. Whatever media I use, I always want my works to be like little jewels: portable, personal, intricate and intimate.

Nihilism and Nightlights

In December 1984, when I was 21 and just seven months out of Mills College, I got what was supposed to be a six-week temp job at Apple Computer testing word processing software for Macintosh computers. I’d beta tested software on an early Lisa computer (the Mac’s big sister) when I worked as a Jill-of-all-trades at a computer consulting firm during and after college, so a friend at Apple thought I might be a good fit. I figured it would be a good stopgap job on the way to a career as a writer or museum curator. What I thought would be a short career hiccup grew into 7-1/2 years at Apple, first as a software test engineer and later as an R&D division newsletter editor.

While being a software test engineer was fun and enlightening and it let me play with cool prototypes for fab new products, what I really wanted to do was write, so during my months as a temp I also wrote ad copy, software documentation, humor pieces and film reviews on the side. I wrote reviews not only for actual films but also for films that existed only in my imagination. One night during the first week of my time at Apple, I got an idea for what I thought could be a funny little film review parody and I came up with a couple of ridiculous ideas for foreign films, then reviewed the fictional movies as if I were the most pompous film reviewer around. I typed up my little piece, edited it and printed it out within the course of a couple of hours. It flowed more easily than just about anything else I’ve written since. The next morning it still looked funny to me, so I decided I’d send it to The San Francisco Chronicle to see whether they might like to put it in the Sunday Punch, their popular arts and entertainment section, in the space they usually saved for humor pieces on the flipside of Herb Caen’s legendary column. Had I thought about the paper’s 750,000-reader Sunday circulation figures or the facts that I was right out of college with a background in history and art history and no journalism background, I might have been daunted. But I was 21 and my youthful belief in endless possibilities saved me from such fears, so I popped my little parody in the mailbox and drove to my supposed six-week job at Apple to crash the MacWrite application as fiercely and often as I could.

A few days later, Rosalie Muller Wright, then the Chronicle’s managing editor of Features and later the editor-in-chief of Sunset Magazine, called to tell me they liked it and would like to publish it. My first attempt at publication was accepted at a big-deal metro paper just like that. It was clear to me that this writing for publication business was much easier than everyone said it would be. (If only all my subsequent efforts could have been as popular with editors.)

Ms. Wright passed my work along to Peter Sussman, who was an editor at the Chronicle for 29 years and went on to teach journalism at Stanford and to become an important writer and editor of articles and books about California’s criminal justice system. He became my editor. I had no idea that my little parody would let me work under two such impressive and important journalists. Mr. Sussman edited my piece, calling me with small but excellent suggestions for changes, and I got my check for $50. I was hooked. It had all been so easy that I sent them another parody funnier than the first to see what would happen. They liked it so much, they offered me the chance to write a series of parody reviews. I grabbed the chance with both hands and wrote one a month for six months. It was one of the best gigs I ever had.

My favorite of the six parodies was the second one, “Nihilism and Nightlights.” Here it is.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Among the new foreign film releases this season are two films by female directors: Bebe Francobolli’s ode to Dada, “Ciao Chow Chow,” and Christiane de Geronimo’s children’s thriller, “Nightlight.”

Francobolli is the daughter of the Suprematist painter Mazlow Molotov (“The Black Russian”) and Constructivist painter Kiri de Kulpe Kloonig (a former courtesan known as “The Dutch Treat”). Bebe’s parents met in Rome at an international stamp-collecting convention and became Italian citizens before their only child was born.

Named Bebe Francobolli (literally Baby Postage Stamps) after her parents’ avocation, she refused to become a philatelist and rejected the art of her ancestors. She turned to Dada, the nihilistic movement that created “non-art,” laughed at overly serious artists and spawned Surrealism.

These influences can be seen clearly in “Ciao Chow Chow,” in which Bebe herself stars. Translated from Italian into English, and then back into Italian again, with no subtitles, the film begins and ends with Bebe waving goodbye to her beloved Chow dog, Antipasto, symbol of her lost youth and of her ridiculous early films.

“Ciao” is a parody of a self-parody, masterful in its simplicity and in its bold statement that life is to be laughed at, and that nothing is serious or sacred.

Basically nihilistic, with Dadaist subject matter and camera angles, this film is convoluted and uneven, personalized and stylized, and will make no sense to anyone who has not seen Bebe’s early travelogue films. Yet, Bebe promises that it will be her last film work, and that alone has prompted critical acclaim.

Avant-garde director Christiane de Geronimo’s “Nightlight” tells the terrifying story of the night the Mickey Mouse nightlight burned out in the Turner household. Little Bobby Turner is forced to face The Clown Puppet, The Vicious Animal Slippers and The Dreaded Man from Under the Bed.

Filmed in black and white, “Nightlight” captures the shadowy horror of every child’s bedroom, and forces even the adult viewer to come to grips with The Thing in the Closet. Not for the squeamish.

De Geronimo’s earlier attempts at children’s thrillers include “The Teddy Bear with No Face,” Scream, Barbie, Scream” and “Revenge of the Katzenjammer Kids,” in which comic-strip characters from the past are set loose on an unwitting Nebraska farm town.

“Nightlight,” the third of her bedtime stories series, features the late French film star Estella de Lumiere in her final role before the dreadful accident on the set of “Murder on the Trampoline.”

Next month, two recent remakes: Canadian filmmaker and ice-hockey champion Pete Steed’s sport-oriented version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; Fujiko Shiatsu’s sumo wrestling remake of “The Music Man.”

An Embarrassment of Riches

Over the past month I’ve started three blog entries that I abandoned because they didn’t inspire me enough to want to share them with you. I’ve felt like there was a lot to say, but that too much was going on in my world to let me focus on any one thing carefully and completely enough to write about it properly. Rather than produce and polish a variety of small pieces and scatter my energies, I had to devote those expansive but still finite energies to making sense of my own personal soap opera, and my writing for public consumption had to be shelved for a spell.

I spent most of the past night ruminating, twisting and torquing in bed as I overanalyzed my little universe and all that orbits within it. All these revolutions on my own axis helped me realize a great deal. Forgive my switching metaphors abruptly, but I see that I’ve been in collecting mode for years and especially for the past few months. Now, like a museum curator, I need to take stock of the collection and determine which pieces need special handling, which are underappreciated gems, which need to be shared with other collectors and which need to be, as they so awkwardly put it in the art world, deaccessioned.

Collecting things and thoughts, dreams and relationships, inspirations and art project parts, beautiful experiences and thoughts and possibilities has absorbed my attention for some time now. I have trouble letting go of or giving up some of these fabulous entries in my personal life museum, since each new part of the collection represents a new opportunity, a new understanding, a new chance at finding or creating beauty. Each new art project, essay, book idea, friendship or purchase has been exciting, but each has also opened the door to doubt and questions, leaps of faith forward as well as a lack of faith in myself, bursts of great confidence and moments of weakness, a feeling of being overwhelmed, cluttered, presented with much possibility but unable to attend to it all properly. What a roiling, rolling and relentless time it’s been.

This has been a time to gather stray bits and pieces for art projects and assemblages rather like a magpie does, looking for the sparkly bits that catch my eye and work well with other things in my collection, until I have so many delicious art supplies that I can’t find half of what I want among the tasty rare papers, the hand-carved buttons, the bits of gnarled twig carefully collected with a friend or the pens that feel so good in my hand that I never want to put them down. I’ve collected images and ideas, notes and photos, cards and fabric swatches until my source file of amusing and inspiring oddments has spread beyond reasonable confines and overwhelms rather than delights me. The books and articles I’ve gathered to help me research not one but two important writing projects lie next to two biographies of Shakespeare I want to read after I catch up with my New Yorker back issues, my unread short story collections, my books of essays and videotapes and notes to myself. Piled up in too many places are the endless design and fashion magazines I love to flip through for ideas on combining pattern and color, shadow and space, movement and stasis in my art, my writing, my home.

In addition to collecting things and information, I've collected people. I’ve made concerted efforts to meet engaging, endearing and sometimes exasperating new people these past few months and realized anew the importance of prioritizing relationships and art above other things in life. I’ve recognized a wellspring of creative ideas and exciting possibilities within myself and faced fears about braving the unknown and perhaps failing to focus my talents in a way that elevates and expands upon my ideas. This has been a time of expanding and opening up my eyes and ears, considering, cogitating, questioning, and of acquiring things and thoughts, ideas and opportunities, friendships and goals. Sometimes it’s good to open one’s arms to all the possibilities, and sometimes it’s necessary to choose what to hold onto and what to put down. My arms are too full now and the treasures are getting heavy, so it seems this is the time to rest and regroup, to choose and in some cases, to let go of possibilities to make room to foster those most appropriate for my life, my abilities and my opportunities.

So it is that I’ve been choosing and sorting and prioritizing my things, my work and my life. I’ve felt my energies, thoughts and talents scattered all over the place and have worried that it was a bad thing, a difficult thing, a sign of error or an excess of desire for novelty, perhaps a lack of direction or discipline. Now I’m realizing that it was a process of learning and preparation in more ways than I was aware of. I’ve collected too much stuff in hopes of making it into something greater as well as in an effort to comfort myself during a tricky time, I know. It’s not hard to find elements of the excessive and extraneous in my home right now. I’ve had trouble relinquishing things that remind me of my history or of people who have touched me, and I’ve had difficulty saying no to things that might make wonderful art works, sewing projects, inspiration for stories or essays, unusual gifts or decorative displays. I’ve made myself tired writing or talking with or meeting too many new people too late into the night or too early in the morning so that I could learn from them and expand my world by trying to see it through their eyes. It’s now time to sort through the experiences, the thoughts, the books and photos, beads and silks, plants and pillows and papers, and to give some of my riches away and turn others down in order to clear a space in my mind, heart and home for the necessary things.

So that I might have a clearer sense of direction and purpose, I’ve had to make difficult choices about which possibilities to cling to and which to turn from, which projects to put aside, and which treasures to scatter among those who don’t have the luxury of living among this embarrassment of riches in which I find myself floating. Some of my dearest treasures have been friendships that haven’t blossomed as I might have liked, but even those have bred understanding and enlightenment, and I bless and thank each friend who helped me along my journey, even if our paths were sometimes unsteady or poorly lit. I hope the dear people I've met along my path will find joy, humor, illumination and pleasure in being with people who delight them. I wish them all the awareness, confidence, humility and peace that can come with self-knowledge. Each remarkable person who has walked with, sat with, spoken to or written to me during these past months has given me a gift and allowed me to give the gift of myself, my insights, my enthusiasm or my talents in a way which enriched me. I hope each feels he or she gained something valuable from the experience. I know I have. I am grateful to each of them.

Going out into the world to gather these experiential and material riches has taken a great deal of energy. I’m not by nature comfortable pushing my way out into the world or presenting my viewpoints, my art or myself to those not already within my circle of friends. Having the chance to have fine, thoughtful, clever and insightful people get to know me and open their hearts to me in return has been a gift, but sometimes gifts come at a price. To be truly heard, seen and understood may be exciting, but it also means risking being misunderstood, being rejected, being undervalued or being challenged. Learning experiences are enriching and sometimes inspiring, but they also jog loose old fears and expectations and invite navel-gazing and self-critical moments that can shut out the light of the world around. Enlightenment may be a noble goal, but the path to it can be steep and the road rocky. And when two paths diverge in that famous yellow wood, sometimes there really is a right or a wrong road to take or have taken, and it’s not always clear which is which before one gets to the dark and winding bit in the middle.

Gathering, collecting, building and amassing are more fun than sorting, clearing out and making the hard choices about what treasures stay and which ones must go. But once the winnowing is done, true treasures stand out more clearly and their preciousness is easier to acknowledge. And after all the gathering, considering and analyzing, I have some true treasures in my life now which weren't there a few months ago, and which I wouldn't have if I hadn't been willing to dive in, carry more than I could hold easily and ask difficult questions of myself and sometimes of others. And, of course, I wouldn't have some of my greatest treasures if I hadn't also had some outrageously good fortune and been shown some generous and openhearted love and kindness. Part of what I have has come from being a keen-eyed magpie who knows what to gather and how to find the good stuff, but the greater part of what I've been blessed with comes simply from being a very lucky duck. This little hopping bird is fortunate, indeed.

Sometimes it’s more important to gather wits than bits and pieces, and giving away can enrich one more than hoarding can. I hope I can find joy and opportunity in the winnowing phase now; part of me fears it will be a hard slog that makes me face more fears than I can or should. But part of me knows that the only way to get safely past these fears will be to walk right through them and shed them as I do so, so on I go.

Tasty Web Sites

Ah, babies, I am so busy enjoying the sheer ultrafabulousness of my life that I've been too overwhelmed by the swirling vortex of wonderment I'm spinning in to take a moment to fashion another show-stopping delight of a blog entry for you.

Or something like that.

So while I change from this little sequinned, split-level, scanty-but-sensational evening gown into my whirly-girly perfect party dress for another champagne-soaked night on the town with my coterie of adoring admirers, let me just take a quick minute to share these scintillating sites with you for your perusing pleasure.

• The Fagat Guide: Wickedly witty site, home of insights from darling gay guys, including dish on Bravo's brilliant fashion reality show, Project Runway (the only, only, only reality show I will watch, not only for the drama but especially for the chance to watch wildly talented people create art out of next to nothing—how I pine for the show during these long months of hiatus); how to parse a Dolce & Gabbana ad; and only-in-New-York stories.

• Princess Sparkle Pony's Photo Blog: Inspires prolonged laughter. Subtitled, "I keep track of Condoleezza's hairdo so you don't have to," this blog includes terrific politically themed photos and favorite features such as "Sparkle Pony Interactive," which lets you vote on the following question: "Which would you enjoy more? An elegant sit-down dinner with Condoleezza Rice; bloodthirsty ticks applied directly to your eyeballs; scabies; awakening to find Charles Krauthammers' mutilated corpse in your bed; flying in a helicopter with Tony Snow; or spontaneous finger loss?"

• Jesus of the Week. 'Nuff said.

With the Lights Out, It's Less Dangerous

With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto
An albino
A mosquito
My libido
Yay!

When Nirvana released the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, it helped make them into rock gods. Ironic, isn’t it, since the song was Kurt Cobain’s dig at mainstream culture. According to Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, “Kurt really despised the mainstream. That's what ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was all about: the mass mentality of conformity.” But the song, which Rolling Stone magazine ranked ninth in its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, was too catchy, sexy, moody, hard to understand, hard-edged, frayed and nearly perfect to escape the clutches of the mainstream. Its hard-to-decipher lyrics were skewered by Weird Al Yankovic in his parody, “Smells Like Nirvana,” which featured lines like:

What is this song all about?
Can't figure any lyrics out
How do the words to it go?
I wish you'd tell me, I don't know

In a 1994 MTV interview, Kurt Cobain said of the parody, “Oh, I laughed my butt off. I thought it was one of the funniest things I ever saw. He has some good people working for him. . . . They really know how to reproduce things to the T. He had the exact same setup. It's the same video with him in it. It's great.”

For an entertaining roundup of horrible cover versions of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," you must check out April Winchell's awesome multimedia site full of free audio clips that will keep you listening and chuckling in amused horror for hours, long after you've exhausted the "Teen Spirit" covers in polka, disco, Paul Anka and Gregorian chant versions. Winchell (daughter of the late ventriloquist Paul Winchell, who was also the voice of Tigger for Disney for many years) has a radio show in Los Angeles and has put together a very funny Web site complete with the best collection of odd aural pleasures I've found online: corporate training tapes, celebrities like Leonard Nimoy and Farrah Fawcett singing (they really shouldn't), Abba covers in Hindi, masturbation tips from a NYC phone hotline, Johnny Cash singing "I Walk the Line" in German, Dolly Parton singing "Stairway to Heaven," a whole section devoted to terrifying Christian recordings—you name it.

The original "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a perfect blending of droning, captivating, chant-like repetition; buzzing power chords; barely understandable but still compelling lyrics and ragged-voiced angst. It encapsulates suffering, cynicism, dry humor and teen alienation. It felt fresh 15 years ago, and it still sounds fresh and raw today, despite being named the Most Played Video on MTV Europe in the 2000 Guinness Book of World Records. Even though it’s one second over five minutes long, it doesn’t feel drawn out; its pacing, its bridges, even its repetition make it somehow stronger rather than monotonous. The layering of instruments makes for a great, pulsing wash of sound, but within the layers are subtleties, long-held and echoing guitar notes, a threatening bass line, and Cobain’s growling voice matching the bending notes and jagged timbre of the instruments around him, so his voice becomes an instrument to match them. The melding of his own voice and the growling guitar when he says “Yay!” is spookily satisfying, and gave me the same little shiver after the hundredth listen that it gave me the first time.

While the music on Nirvana’s second album, “Nevermind,” from which “Smells Like Teen Spirit” comes, is classified as grunge, it’s really just a polished, pure and more accessible form of punk, slowed down enough to be grabbed and ridden on, but it channels the anarchic spirit of British punks like the Sex Pistols, whose seminal album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” probably inspired Cobain to name the Nirvana album “Nevermind” in their honor. (Some say it’s also a tribute to the Replacements song “Nevermind.”) Unlike American punk bands like the wonderful Ramones, whose screamingly fast-paced songs about sniffing glue and teenage lobotomy patients, punk rockers and beating on brats with baseball bats were essentially all in good, mindless fun, the Sex Pistols really were about anarchy, giving the finger to the establishment, protesting the moral bankruptcy of middle- and upper-class British twits, the monarchy and the conservative political leaders of the 1970s and 1980s. They were the real deal, and Cobain admired that twisted, angry, anarchic vibe. That vibe was bent, reformed and polished into some of Nirvana’s best work, and their songs were musically inventive and attractively melodic enough to grab people who would never give straight punk a second thought while being honest enough to appeal to pure punks as well. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was essentially a crossover hit, and its success rather embarrassed Cobain, since it made him and Nirvana superstars beyond imagining and, it seems, beyond Cobain’s ability to handle the attention, the adulation, and being co-opted by the mainstream until he became a media darling largely against his will. His drug problems and ultimate suicide of course only fueled his legend and turned him into a mythic figure of alienated youth and artistic purity tarnished by too much interaction with the filthy mainstream, the same mainstream which his widow Courtney Love alternately woos and trashes.

So where does the title come from? Kurt Cobain dated Tobi Vail of the group Bikini Kill, she used Teen Spirit, a deodorant marketed to teen girls. Bikini Kill member Kathleen Hanna painted “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” on his wall to imply that he was marked with his girlfriend’s scent, but Cobain didn’t realize the reference and thought he was being complimented on his spirit of youthful rebellion. Again, how ironic: his anti-mainstream screed also served as inadvertent advertising for a Colgate-Palmolive product aimed at the teen masses.

Emotionally Scarring Toys

In December 2005 researchers at England’s University of Bath released the results of a study that found that children, especially girls, see torturing and mutilating their Barbies as a common and enjoyable form of play. An article in the London Times stated that “mutilation ranged from cutting off hair to decapitating and putting the dolls in microwaves.” Children ages seven to eleven were said to “see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a 'cool' activity,” according to the article. The children were aware that they were being exploited by “over-marketing and over-charging” and that rejecting the doll was a “rite of passage” engaged in by children who felt they’d outgrown their Barbies. “Barbies are not special,” said the researchers. “They are disposable, and are thrown away and rejected.”

I considered my own and my daughter’s history with Barbies, and I had to take issue with some of the article’s findings. Cutting Barbie’s hair isn’t really an act of mutilation in the way that putting her in the microwave is; children know that cutting their own hair gets them in trouble, but cutting Barbie’s hair gives them the satisfaction of distorting her appearance and messing with the standard and approved way of viewing her, yes, but it also lets them know what it feels like to cut hair. The Barbies I grew up around often had missing toes; this is not because we wanted to bind their feet golden lotus–style and further fetishize their sexual-fantasy-based bodies but because chewing the rubbery plastic felt good and eventually gnawing away at them resulted in their coming off completely in the mouth in a pleasant if slightly disturbing fashion. Pulling Barbie heads off was common when I was a child, not because we were acting out scenes from Robespierre's Reign of Terror but because we wanted to trade them around among dolls with different features and outfits. We also pierced our dolls’ ears (leaving them looking grey and infected) and bent their knees back and forth so much for the sheer pleasure of hearing the click click click of their joints that their skin tore.

But do people take pleasure in creating their own torture tableaux featuring Barbie, Ken and all their plastic molded-bodied friends? Of course. Their constantly perky expressions and injection-molded perfection do invite children to challenge their prefab poise. They look so inviting in the box, but take them out of the vivid fuchsia packaging and their clothes are hard to put on, and their hair gets bunched up and never lies flat again and gets permanently dull and stringy when Barbie is invited to play in the bathtub. Ken’s spray-painted hair wears off and he ends up with flesh coloring showing through in patches that have nothing to do with standard male-pattern baldness. Barbie is not only free of genitalia, but sometimes has molded skin-colored patterns simulating underwear built right into what would be her buttocks if she had any gluteal muscles to cover her sorry, skinny ass.

Barbie’s original design was based on that of the Bild Lilli, a 1950s German sex doll aimed at men. Don’t believe me? Check out this side-by-side comparison. When Barbie debuted in 1959, many parents found her obviously sexualized nature disturbing. But, of course, this aspect of her is partly what has always made her so alluring to children. She’s the premiere socially sanctioned sexualized plaything that allows young children to engage in pre-sexual roleplay and pretend to embody the roles they think are expected of them as they mature. Children live out stereotypes with Barbies and also challenge them and laugh at them.

The by-now widespread delight that children take in trashing their Barbies when they feel they’ve outgrown them might be a reaction to the stereotypes, expectations and mass-merchandizing overconsumption extravaganza that Barbie represents, at least in part. But often Barbie’s mutilation is an unintentional byproduct of trying to personalize her and make her more interesting and individual. When this attempt results in a Barbie who is almost always less appealing as a result, both her loss of allure and her inability to grow into something uniquely appealing make her a sorry remnant of a time of earlier naivete and a reminder of failed attempts at creating more individualized beauty. Rather than feel bad every time we see what our attempts at beautification have done, it’s easier to dissociate her from her former status as beauty icon if we take her destruction even further. If she’s ugly and all the gloss and perfection that we once admired in her is gone, why not turn her into a doggy chew toy or see what happens if we take nail polish remover to the paint on her face? If we turn her into a science experiment, we feel less disappointed in her lost glory.

In 1992, Barbie’s reputation for mindlessness was bolstered by the release of Teen Talk Barbie. This talking Barbie spewed forth phrases like “Math is hard!” and “Will we ever have enough clothes?” A group calling itself the Barbie Liberation Organization soon became famous for engaging in acts of Barbie sabotage, exchanging Barbie’s talking guts for the voice hardware found in Mattel’s Talking G.I. Joe dolls. The BLO repackaged three hundred dolls and slid them back onto store shelves. When unsuspecting little girls tried their new Barbies at home, the fashion dolls grunted out “Vengeance is mine!” and "Dead men tell no tales," while little boys' new G.I. Joes cooed “Let’s plan our dream wedding!”

Of course, some toys are less than glorious to begin with, and only become more disturbing or ridiculous with time. Others begin attractively and grow frightening with disuse or misuse. Such are the toys found on one of my favorite Web sites, DisturbingAuctions.com. The site’s home page states that Disturbing Auctions “is dedicated to the research and study of the most bizarre items found for sale on Internet auction sites. Not the obviously fake auctions, like the infamous human kidney, but truly tacky stuff that people really, honestly, believed that someone would (and in some cases did) buy.”

DisturbingAuctions.com features home furnishings including the velvet painting of Jesus blessing an 18-wheeler, accessories such as the purse made of a bull’s scrotum, clothing, such as used gym shorts and a matching used jock strap, and haute cuisine, including 200 freeze-dried pork chops. But nothing can compare to discovering the hideous figurines, including the “Check Out My Ass Clown” (make sure to look at the optional magnified view for ultimate flamboyant clown perusing pleasure), the items classified as Terrifying Dolls, or, my favorites, the Emotionally Scarring Toys.

The Terrifying Dolls category features the pained, shriveled and body-part-challenged Puppet Assortment, the pinheaded Li’l Head Doll, and Baby Tears-Your-Flesh, a.k.a. Little Dolly No-Head. Big Hands Baby and the Saddam Hussein puppet also get honorable mention.

Clowns have a special place on Disturbing Auctions; there is a clown brooch, a clown ashtray and a vicious Cranky Clown Lava Lamp, among other items. Dead stuffed frogs also have their places, as does the stuffed and mounted genuine Deer Butt. The Clark Gable candle puts one in mind of a wax-covered severed head, and why the seller of the Inflatable Ladies' Legs had to mention that they fit in the mouth when not inflated is anyone’s guess.

Still, the Emotionally Scarring Toys is the biggest, juiciest treasure trove of outrageous kitsch. From the Dean Martin Hand Puppet to our beloved Big-Ass Donkey, from Darth Small to the marvelously named Pooduck, it’s hard to find an entry that isn’t deeply, horribly, hideously wrong down to its very core.

While most of the site has stayed static for years, there is a related site, DisturbingAuctions.com/daily, where visitors can post their own horrific online auction discoveries and attach their own witty (or, more frequently, just vulgar) commentaries. There are occasional gems to be found here, but the older, original DisturbingAuctions.com site has the most consistently hideous and perfectly captioned offerings. All hail the Pooduck!

Painful Blessings

For the past three years I've been building a lush woodland garden around my home. I live directly next to a greenbelt and a creek runs alongside my house from some rooms I can hear the creek as it rushes by in the rainy months, and in spring and summer months the sounds of nickel-sized frogs lull me to sleep. In these months when the weather is warm enough to leave the windows open, I hear the coyotes' nighttime choruses of yips even more distinctly, though their calls to each other echo along the creek even in the cooler months, and I hear them even when all the windows in my home shut out the storms and the cold.

In these spring months, my daughter and I delight not only in all the budding, bursting, blooming plant growth in our garden, but in the frequent presence of gorgeous little animals. We love to watch the birds, an occasional vole or chipmunk, many entertaining squirrels, and, when we're very lucky, rabbits.

Others in our neighborhood complain about the rabbit population and how rabbits devour tender garden shoots. They resent the rabbits and even laugh when their dogs chase bunnies through the streets. Now, I've planted many times more plants in my garden than anyone else in my neighborhood has, even those who have larger lots, and I've lost several hundred dollars worth of shrubs, perennials, ground covers and many bulbs to rabbits in the past three years. So what? Yes, I'd like to see more of those bulbs, and I wish they hadn't done such damage to several of my favorite new flowering shrubs. But they're rabbits. That's their job. And they're gorgeous. The shapes of their bodies, their limbs, their delightful white tails that bob along and disappear when they're surprised between a fuchsia and some hostas, the exquisite texture and shading of their fur, their long and tender ears, their perfect faces: to us, they're some of the most beautiful creatures on the planet. When they come to feast on our clover or hide in our perennials, we feel honored by their presence. If we drive up and see them on our little lawn out front when we get home, we quietly go out to watch them and talk to them in soothing tones. If we see one out back while we're eating breakfast, we feel we've started the day with a blessing. For us, they're not only symbols of spring but of nature in general; of regeneration, yes, but also of vulnerability and of fleeting beauty, and since they rarely stay long, we treasure each visit and call up or down the stairs to each other to remind ourselves that we're witnessing something special, and how lucky we are to share in it.

A couple of weeks ago I decided I really had to do something about the groundcover that was overtaking the berm under my cherry tree near the front porch. The sweet woodruff that I'd planted there so nonchalantly last year had taken over rapidly and hidden all the other tender little things I wanted to focus on, so, reluctantly, I admitted that I needed to pull it up in great bunches. I pulled back a big armful and set it down behind me, and as I turned back to the berm I noticed a hole about two inches across. I moved closer and peeked inside, and I could see movement and three small heads. There was a trio of some sort of animal with heads perhaps one by two inches in size, and as I looked carefully I saw that they were newborns and their eyes were still closed. As they sniffed around after I'd disturbed their quiet I realized that I had found a little nest of tiny bunnies. We'd seen a pair of rabbits on that very berm a day before, and now we realized why. In my determination to try to push nature around, I'd unearthed a little treasure hole. I felt awful; I took my clusters of freshly-pulled sweet woodruff and piled them before the hole again to keep it from being too open and obvious a target for neighborhood cats, dogs, coyotes or other predators. I was glad I'd been wearing rubber gloves so that I hadn't spread too much of my human scent around their home. I ran to get my daughter so that she could peek at them, too, and we cooed and sighed and made happy girly noises in our delight at finding a whole small furry family living in our garden right outside our front door.

Since then we've noticed adult rabbits in our garden every few days, mostly the rabbit we believe is the bunnies' mom, filling up on good green things so she can offer warm milk to her babies. We've tried not to disturb the little family, but we've been excited and pleased at the prospect of meeting the little ones when they decided to go abroad into the garden at large.

This afternoon I was working in Seattle on a freelance editing job. I was just finishing up a week's project and the five hours of sleep I had last night had worn off some time before. I was grinding through the last of my work when I got a call from my daughter telling me that one of the babies was sitting on our porch at that moment, and that it had let her get within two feet of it. It was gorgeous and still, and looked at her patiently with big, dark eyes. She was mesmerized, and so was it. She noticed that flies were hovering around it, though, and it wasn't flicking them away or running from her. We thought nothing of that, though; it was a young thing, so perhaps it didn't know enough to fear us yet.

An hour later we were looking gently around the garden to see if we could find the magic bunny. Horribly, we did; it was lying dead on the berm, about five feet from the hole in which it was born. It didn't look like it had been attacked by one of the dogs careless neighbors let run loose around our home. It was a hot day, and we haven't seen any of its family for a few days, and I fear it may have been abandoned when the others left the little hole, and that it might have starved and suffered from dehydration.

Its little body was among the loveliest I've ever seen: dark, lovely eyes still open to the world, the large white tail, perfectly formed little feet, dear long ears, inviting toast-colored fur. I asked Lily whether she wanted to be with me when I buried it, and she said she wanted to stay with me through everything. So we wrapped our bunny in the funnies; we figured it wouldn't have wanted to be in a hard, dark box, and that a little paper shroud would disintegrate faster than fabric and would let it become part of the ferns in the back corner of our garden more quickly. We couldn't bear to lay it alone in the soil, so we buried it with clover and our favorite variegated pineapple mint, and laid it in a quiet corner with rich soil. We laid a perfect purple clematis blossom and a fragrant sprig of dwarf lilac above its little body, and thanked it for spending its last hours in our company.

A couple of years ago an exquisitely colored love bird, clearly formerly someone's pet, flew onto our driveway while I was gardening and looked up into my face. It was tired and didn't want to be held, but it wouldn't go further than one of my rhododendron branches, so I knew it was weak. I took it in and let it rest in a ventilated box and asked around the neighborhood, but nobody knew it. We put up "FOUND BIRD" signs and took it to the vet to make sure it was okay, but within two days it became listless and had trouble eating. We put its cage in a warm spot and placed a heating pad against the corner and a blanket around the base of the cage, since the vet said the bird, who appeared so healthy, actually showed significant liver damage from being fed too many fatty seeds. It was a very sick little thing and needed warmth and love.

That night, it died in the warm little corner we made for it. We mourned the beautiful bird we had known for so little time, but we also felt blessed that it had chosen to live its final days with us. The same was true with the tiny bunny; for whatever reason, it got as close to us as it could. Yes, it may have simply been seeking a shady spot on a hot day, a cool porch to rest on as its body slowly depleted itself of nutrients. But still, we felt that this small rabbit, like the lovebird, had given us a gift by allowing us to get so close to it and to show it kindnesses just before and after death. We felt humbled in the presence of such beauty and such an early end to its life, and grateful to have seen something so ephemeral and precious up close, right in our own garden.

I spent an hour in the garden after I buried the rabbit. I watered and admired all the new growth, and wondered at how much had happened there in just the last five days since I last took a considered look around at it all. And I wondered at how fast that little rabbit had grown, and at how much hidden life there is all around me in my garden, and how many dramas and stories and secrets there are going on in the houses of the neighbors around me. I realized how odd it is that we can feel alone in such a densely populated world with so many animals right below our feet, and so many tender people right on the other sides of those thin walls we walk and drive by every day.

It was painful for my daughter to have the remarkably lovely experience with the perfect bunny less than two hours before she discovered its lifeless body four feet away. There was a cruelty to the situation, to the rough juxtaposition of great fortune and loss. But we were better for having had it, even with the pain. We again felt the blessing and honor of being chosen by a tender creature in its final hours, and were reminded how fragile the trust it put in us was, and how much responsibility we have to honor and appreciate it.