Laying Down Color



Tribeca Loft?

Bruce Bostwick, Mr. Uber Meticulous Painter, is here imparting some desperately needed freshness to the downstairs front hall and bathroom.  Houses get tired-looking (hell, I get tired-looking).  You know those Open Houses  with graying sheers on the windows and ancient chipped paint?  We were on the road to that.  Truly.

After two days of work, Bruce has stripped the faux paint-sponged wallpaper from the bathroom walls and filled the three big holes.  He's talked me out of a mad moment of  thinking I'd go Tribeca Loft and live with the stripped surface.

"Won't go with the house," he said, calmly.  Bruce is not going to let me drive off the deep end.  On the other hand, I wouldn't have an audacious red dining room if he hadn't forced the issue in 2001.  Stop dallying, he told me after I agonized for a year. I  finally chose a red, closed my eyes, he painted five coats, and I love it.

With a properly prepared surface, the bathroom will be painted with Pratt &  Lambert "Cream Whip," an unaudacious, airy peach.   Bruce refers to that stage not as painting but as "laying down color."

Could there be a more meticulously organized brush box?

Lining Up for Thanksgiving

Yesterday's record number of households for a Monday at the Berkeley Food Pantry:  82.  Number of  brand-new clients: 5.  Number of regular Monday crew: 6.   Cal students helping out especially for Thanksgiving: 2.   People who told me they were hungry but had already come in too many times this month: 2  [they got "make-up" bags].    People who said they either paid the rent or bought groceries: 2.   This is the story for many Pantry clients.

In the meantime, my sister and I are trying to scale back Thanksgiving dinner, or at least the hassle that goes with it.  Turkey sandwiches?  Do we want all that labor-intensive brown, mushy food?  We don't, but people who don't have a choice definitely do.

Quilts (?)

On Sunday I went to a show at the Berkeley Art Center called, "Paper Quilt Project: Collaborations in Contemporary Craft."  The place was almost empty, and I had a good, long look.

Now, I am what is called a traditional quilter.  I work with fabric, in a pattern based on a grid, and the finished quilt has a back, a front, and batting all sewn together.  The whole works can be thrown on a bed. Or a wall.

The quilts on display were contemporary interpretations of quilts.  They were made of paper, fabric, collage, lace, gouache, graphite, photographs, pastel, mica, colored pencil, masking tape, and/or gold leaf.  Back, front, and batting not required.  A departure from traditional quilting, yes, but I was game.

Game, but edgy.

I liked a lot of the pieces, even one that consisted of a video projected onto the back of a old, beat-up quilt:  Quilt as Screen.  The video showed a boy and then a man, wandering around with another quilt wrapped around them.  As a conceptual piece, it worked.  As a quilt, per se, no.  According to me.

In the little booklet about the show ($3), I read this:  "Aside from being an inviting, warm and humble medium, the quilt has an intrinsic capacity to connect people...this uniquely democratic folk art."    It's humble I have a problem;  I completely buy into "democratic."  People who didn't go to art school can make art with fabric and a sewing machine and batting.  Do we need quilting to be elevated via new materials and methods into something more than "warm and humble"?  Can't  we call this new species of collaborative art "collage," or "works on paper," or "mixed media,"? Leave quilting alone, I want to say.   Let it be.  And while you're at it, take a good long look at the Gees Bend and the Amish quilts.  Their makers may have been humble, but they needed no more than thread and fabric to make art.

Tammy Rae Carland & Allison Smith
Unititled (Sears Roebuck catalog), 2011 (detail)
digital inkjet print on hand-sewn paper

This piece had squares and lattice but was an utterly flat representation of a traditional quilt.  My questions were "why?" and "what's new"?

Back at the Little Farm...

There was an era in the '80's when many of my pals were having babies and I was always finding myself at the Little Farm in Tilden Park. God, it was boring!  The kids, usually toddlers, were endlessly entertained, and I, a non-mom, was bored to the point of vowing I'd never, ever go back.   Don't care re cows, chickens, and pigs.  Not interested.

Well, today I went back.  Claudia's adorable nephew, Rylan, made a long-awaited visit to Berkeley, and the Little Farm was a welcome destination for a 19-month old who wanted to get out of the house (which he indicated by  knocking on the inside of her front door).  Off we went, him with his pacifier hanging out of the corner of his mouth like a forgotten cigarette.  He was delighted beyond measure.   Photos below.  Indulge me.

Rylan and Claudia admiring a cow

The first of two lunches



 

Where the Hell Am I?

I spent part of a rainy afternoon labeling photos from our trip to Italy and England last spring.  Six hundred photos with no labels and an aging mind grappling to figure out what I'm looking at.  Not good.  Anyone know where I am, above?  It's somewhere in the Villa  Borghese Gardens in Rome, a museum of some kind.  Did not go inside or I might remember.

The other day, my friend Laura called to ask when she and her daughters went to Paris.  She couldn't remember, possibly 2005 or 2006.  I rummaged through my datebooks for those years and found that I'd scrawled "Laura and girls leave for Paris," on August 3, 2006.  She needed to know because Leah's getting a visa for education abroad.

I don't really need to know where I am in that picture, except that it pisses me off that I can't remember.

Off the Male Radar

Yesterday I asked Jerry to haul up some cans of paint from the basement.   I got home: not done.  This morning I asked him to get a package of chicken out of the freezer for tonight's dinner.  We were upstairs.  I had little faith that he'd remember by the time he got downstairs. (He did it, but only after much shouted consultation/instruction up and down the stairs). Dinner is not on his radar before 7:30 pm.

I just finished a book called "'I Don't Know How She Does It," by Allison Pearson, a young British woman who is witty and heartbreakingly accurate in her assessment of what women notice and feel burdened by and DO, and what men do not.

"Women," she writes, "carry the puzzle of family life in their heads, they just do."  She's referring to couples with children, but this applies to couples, period. In my experience, men do not notice what needs to be done.  If you point it out to them, they don't think it needs to be done.  And even if they do, they don't know how to do it.  Or, to be fair, they make a stab at it and the woman has to do it over again.

Some men are on top of the details of running house, remembering birthdays, putting on a Christmas dinner. We once had a very anal male guest who inspected every glass in our cupboard and systematically dropped each mildly cracked one (and not at the rim) into the garbage.  I didn't know whether to be ashamed or pissed. Pearson covers this dilemma very thoroughly.

I used to think that not noticing what needed to be done was a diabolical plot Jerry had hatched to get me to do them.  It took me years to figure out that he simply does not notice.  It is not on his radar that 30-year old white paint has turned gray and needs re-coating.  Or that due to recent repairs,  the downstairs bathroom has three large holes in the wall that need to be filled.  Not on his radar, and that's just the way it is.

It's Not Optional!

This morning, reading about the Penn State coach who  (allegedly but there is much evidence) sexually abused numerous young boys, a practice that apparently went on for years even  after campus officials were notified, I asked Jerry if  really it wouldn't be best if this person were marched out and shot.  A more wicked crime I can hardly imagine.  Once again I tried to understand how anyone could hear of such incidents and not immediately call the police.  I have had this thought many, many times while reading about child sexual abuse by Catholic priests and how bishops repeatedly looked the other way.

I think Penn State should now pay for unlimited therapy for these victims, the administrators involved should be fired and perhaps imprisoned, and even the venerable Joe Paterno should go.  Somewhere.  And think about what happened because he didn't follow-up on what an eyewitness confided in him.

These children will never be the same.  They have been violated and robbed.  When is it going to be beyond question that such predators are reported to police?  I just don't understand.