Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Earth Day




I found this today and was really impressed by the initiative and idea. The Mattress Factory is offering a new level of membership, as I understand it, for Earth Day. It's a "Green Membership" level $30 and totally paperless. Email invites to all events, free admission and so on. I don't think it lasts long so sign up now!

The Mattress Factory is an incredible institution and this is a great idea. I say that as an artist, an environmentalist and a former arts administrator. I really hope more institutions follow suit.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I read this book in college and was directed back to it by the lovely Rachael Hetzel.

From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: (p. 142)

... Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time.

I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman's tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out so much as a pyramid.

Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it - these things had been utterly forgotten - and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, "That was a good time then, a good time to be living."

And I began to remember our time ..."

Friday, April 3, 2009

Knitting @ MERGE


Want to learn to knit?
Want to spend time with other knitters?
Have a project making you crazy and need some help?
Need something to do on a Tuesday evening?

Starting next Tuesday April 7th I will be running a bi-weekly Stitch n' Bitch at Merge Restaurant, located at 439 Delaware Ave just south of Allen St.


The cost is $5 a session. We'll meet from 630-8pm and yarn fanatics of all levels are more then welcome to come and say hello.

Newbies are encouraged to contact me at mergeknitting [at] gmail [dot] com for some advice on what to get. I'll get you started and come fall you'll have many new scarves to wear!

So please come on down and say hello!

See YOU there.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

VSW 40th Anniversary Auction, April 3, 6-9PM

Visual Studies Workshop is hosting their annual fundraising auction this Friday night from 6-9pm in the Siskind Gallery- located at 421 University Avenue, Rochester, New York 14607


I'm going to be there and you should too. You can even pick up the little drawing posted above and support a wickedly cool place all at the same time. Details: vsw.org/auction

See you there!