Bizarre Market! & Referring to a Donkey

Bizarre Market!

The 2nd Annual Jonny Z Festival + Bizarre Market is this Sat., August 8th.

12pm-5pm
200 Block of Shields Ave.
(Between Grove & Hanover)

I'm planning to attend/vend and will have some repeat odds and ends, including Cats in Space, Seed Packet Notebooks and other stuff, pretty much just like last year.

Art 180's current events page has more details.

In other project news, I recently made a sculpy figurine of an angel donkey for a friend at work whose friend's donkey had passed away.

Unpainted it was weird and fleshy:



Then painted, it was cuter:







I had to use a photograph (generic internet donkey) as a reference. It got me thinking about needing "references" in that way. Not that I'm great at drawing cats, but somehow cats have become semi-embedded in my consciousness, anatomy-wise, and I don't HAVE to have a reference to avoid absolutely ridiculous results. Whereas, even though in my mind, I totally know what a horse or a mouse looks like, if I try to draw one without a visual reference, it will just be goofy as all get out.

It would be fun, maybe, to draw a series of things using references vs. not using references, and see how off I am. I actually sort of like the silly result vs. the serious, but I know it's laughable.

I'm wondering what affects the mind to the point that something is memorized visually and you know what it looks like, yet can't get it out of your head and onto paper properly. And what switches that to something which can be translated outwardly... just practice, or time, or staring a lot at things?

Maybe I should have been a kid who traced things more. I never really traced anything.

not quite volubly fervous

Patches kneads her friend.
(video above)


So, for bookclub we're reading The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. It's apparently somehow connected to Lost, and was part of Desmond's hatch library.

I haven't checked up on any of the interpretation, because I was too busy looking up words. Either words I'd never heard of, or words that I could guess the gist of but have never seen in print. Somewhere I have a little notebook where I would write down words to look up, but I never kept up with it. Maybe it's time to restart.

acatalectic - complete, not catalectic (metrically incomplete).

banjaxed - Broken or unusable, usually by result of violent damage.

bulbul - Persian songbird

by the hokey (a petty oath, or asservation) an exclamation of surprise or marvel.

cerebration - activity of the mental processes; thinking.

desideratum - something necessary, highly desirable.

embrasure - 1. (in fortification) an opening, as a loophole or crenel, through which missiles may be discharged. 2. Architecture. a splayed enlargement of a door or window toward the inner face of a wall. 3. Dentistry. the space between adjacent teeth.

extirpate - 1. to remove or destroy totally; do away with; exterminate. 2. to pull up by or as if by the roots; root up: to extirpate an unwanted hair.

gawm - someone who is a simpleton. (slang)

helical - pertaining to or having the form of a helix; spiral.

inimical - 1. adverse in tendency or effect; unfavorable; harmful: a climate inimical to health 2. unfriendly; hostile: a cold, inimical gaze.

invidious - calculated to create ill will or resentment or give offense; hateful: invidious remarks.

noli-me-tangere - don't touch me.

sempiternal - everlasting, eternal

sub rosa - confidentally

takes me to the fair - (I didn't find an actual definition of this) but I think it's "fairly" obvious what it means.

(most definitions courtesy of dictionary.com)


Maybe I need join wordie, though I don't know yet how it works.

New York Recap, Flip book Update, etc.

Last week I took a mini vacation to New York. It was fun, thanks to friends who put me up, put up with me, and showed me around.

I walked around a lot and enjoyed my subway pass and wore a hat and scarf and ear muffs and gloves on occasion.

I went to MoMA's free Target Friday night, where I scrambled to see the following before running out of time:

Rough Cut: Design Takes a Sharp Edge, which included the video installation of Desire Management by Noam Toran.


The Printed Picture which was a very interesting history of printing, with lots of good examples explaining terms I've never actually seen a hard copy example to go along with.


George Lois: The Esquire Covers

Dreamland: Architectural Experiments since the 1970s

Batiste Madalena: Hand-Painted Film Posters for the Eastman Theatre, 1924–1928

After that I made it over to the Helen Hayes Theatre to see Slava's Snow Show, thanks to recommendation and accompaniment by Blight Productions and co. I think this might have been those most audience-interactive show I've ever seen. Great use of paper scraps, fluff, balloons and clowns coming off stage.

I ate Thai, Japanese, pizza, crepes, bagels, pasta, diner brunch, sample caviar on crackers from vodka salesgirls, and who knows what else. I felt like most of my trip revolved around walking and eating. Both of which are things I like to do when traveling.

I didn't buy too much, though I picked up some things like fred flare frozen smiles from Urban Outfitters, a couple things from Japanese stores Uniqlo and Muji, and some from Pearl River. I also went through the Union Square Holiday Market, where everyone was set up with red and white tents and I tried some hot German fruity cidery drink and tea and looked at a lot of stuff.

Sooooooooo. That's my slightly dull recap. The trip was good in a relaxed way. Now I've been back to work all week and running around, it already seems long ago, I probably forgot something. Too much to remember lately: I've sent out about 9 packages since I got home.

Printed 25 copies of the election flipbook the other day (that's 125 pages that have to be cut into 1,250 smaller "pages" so we'll see if that happens). I plan to very leisurely begin to assemble those. I did put one each of the laser jet and the ink jet in my etsy shop and will see how it goes up until inauguration time.



Besides the on and off etsy restocking, I have important stuff to work on that I'm doing in dribs and drabs. I've been watching a bunch of Illustrator tutorial videos hosted by Deke McClelland and I gotta say I just love that guy, very much for the goofiness aspect. I love to see people be goofy in such a skilled way that they can't help but be successful. Unskilled goofy people can't get away with such things. Speaking of unskilled goofy people, what I really need to be doing now is learning more Flash because I want to make the election flipbook into a little Flash movie. I think I can do that with what I know so far, so hopefully showing some basic version of that will be my next post.