It's Your TV

Cactus Butt

Earlier today, I was doing a little bit of sweeping and cleaning out in the front yard with Chris. We often like to do some tidying inside and out on Sunday afternoons and this was what we were doing. Anyway, I was sweeping up all these little dried blossoms and yanking out weeds in this small section of our front yard by the car and garage door. I got most everything gathered together in little piles but had to get down on my hands and knees to hand collect all these camelia blooms that had fallen underneath the bush. I got most of them and made a little pile of those too. When I went to stand up, I completely lost my balance and fell backwards onto a cactus that had been sitting there for months, sort of dying in its pot.

At first, I was laughing and screaming out to Chris (who was about 10ft further down the driveway) that I had fallen on the cactus. He came running over and I turned around and he says, "Oh my god it's like a cartoon!" because I had dense little clusters of cactus needles all over the butt and leg part of my jeans. I chuckled for about one more second until I realized that I felt a prickly burning on my lower butt cheek. When I realized that the needles were not only on my pants but in my skin, I freaked out and ran into the house yelling. I threw the front door open, tore off my jeans and twisted my neck trying to see what my bare ass looked like, hoping that it was not that bad. To my horror, the needles were so tiny and light in color that I could not see them at all!

I grabbed my tweezers and yelled out the door for Chris to come and pull them all out for me. As I laid on the hardwood floor in my underwear in pain, Chris patiently tried to see the needles and pulled most all of them out. There were still a couple left to pull that he couldn't see but I could feel so I attempted to remove them myself with the aid of a hand mirror. I had some luck but didn't get every last one. Tiny red welts were forming and I just felt so annoyed and embarrassed by the whole thing. Anyway, I think that there are still a couple needles still in there but what can I really do when they aren't even visible.

Since the incident, my new nickname, thanks to Chris, has become Cactus Butt or just "CB" for short.
The plant itself was promptly thrown into the trash can.

Crying

It's been a VERY long time and I feel quite guilty about not checking in. Well, not much has been going on but I did just watch a very nice documentary on Marc Jacobs and his creative process called "Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton" by Loic Prigent this weekend - twice. It followed him around while he worked on two collections (his own line and the one for LV), one after another, from start to finish. I have to say that it kind of made me want to cry. And I don't know if that was because the clothes and process were so fantastic and beautiful or because I was reminded once again that I spend the majority of my waking hours in front of a computer doing boring, unimportant, uncreative things at a mouse-feces infested desk. Well, whatever it was, it made me love Marc Jacobs even more and hate Sofia Coppola more as well.
On a side note, my big splurge of 2007, a pair of fuzzy MJ mouse flats, has disappeared without a trace. I had worn them ONCE and to a horrible wedding in L.A. I am convinced that they were stolen from my bag at the airport on my return from the trip. It was nice while it lasted...

Above is MJ before his bronzed and buffed makeover.

Some Things I Bought and A Really Bad Wedding

Obviously, I started writing this this past Tuesday and it's a late posting:

Yesterday morning Chris and I got back from our extended weekend trip to Los Angeles. The initial excuse for making the trip was to attend my cousin's wedding in Pasadena. Well, it turned out that everything but the wedding was great. I guess I've always been kind of a poopy, stinky-faced, bubble burster when it comes to things like weddings and child-bearing. Maybe I was determined to hate the entire thing the minute I found out that the bride's (my cousin was the groom) career goal was to become a wedding planner or perhaps I am envious of someone who lives in such a Disney wonderland that they see this as a legitimate life goal. Anyway, I will continue on this topic some other time...

The one thing that I was very pleased about was being able to finally visit Chinatown. There were a small number of cool little shops tucked away between souvenir shops and live chicken butchers. One I was particularly glad that I went to was Welcome Hunters, which I had found out about a while back while poking around on the web. It was a tiny store but had a worthwhile selection of what seemed to be mainly international designers. Among the pieces was an awesomely weird sweater by an Icelandic brand named Mundi. It was sort of a simplified medieval armor suit knitted up as a hoodie. Too bad I am not wealthy, I would've bought it right then and there. I did get to purchase a little something for myself - a golden rabbit head with fake diamond eyes by a Thai designer called Kloset. I wondered if rabbits were too cliche as squirrels and owls are becoming but somehow decided on it anyway.

The other highlight of my trip was going to MOCA and seeing the Cosima von Bonin show. I guess this was her first solo museum show in the U.S. and I really didn't know anything about her until I got there - in a way, that made it even better since it got me so much more excited than seeing an artist that I knew. Anyway, she is based in Germany any does quite a bit of her work with fabric including paintings and sculpture. They brought the room that she used to do a video/performance and visitors could peer into it by climbing some stairs and looking over the tops of the walls. I am not going to attempt to go into detail about her work because it is quite complicated (that is why I bought the catalog). Even with its conceptual nature, I admired the fact that it was also so aesthetically appealing and fun. On a side note, I also realized that I had been looking at one of her fabric paintings for many years now as it is the image on the cover of one of my favorite albums, The Spectrum Between by David Grubbs.

So I came back from L.A. quite satisfied (apart from the family business) and the whole weekend reconfirmed my belief that what makes it such a great art city is its kind of naive optimism and acceptance of any and all trends. It also makes me think of how depressing the "art scene" (if you can even call it that) in the Bay Area is. No place is perfect though, so perhaps its all just a bunch of trade offs.

Miserable Widget as a Sea Snail

She won in the "Most Creative" category for her costume at the employee Halloween party. Unfortunately for her, the prize was a doggy seatbelt.
Thanks for being such a good sport, Widget!

Giant Sof' Boy!!!