Whelp Hunting

"It was noon before they began to find the bills of Sleary's Horse-riding on barns and walls, and one o'clock when they stopped in the market place."

By general consent, they even avoided that side of the street on which he habitually walked.

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He looked round the lamp upon his table, and saw, with amazement, his eldest daughter.

"What do I know, father," said Louisa in her quiet manner, "of tastes and fancies; of aspirations and affections..."

...Louisa saw her lying with an awful lull upon her face, like one who was floating away upon some great water, all resistance over, content to be carried down the stream.

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I inferred, from its being so miserable a marriage, that it was probably an unequal one in point of years.

The first beat of foreshadowing Ms. Sparsit's behavior later on in the novel.

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"Coketown, Sir," said Bounderby, obstinately taking a chair, "is not the kind of place you have been accustomed to. Therefore, if you will allow me -- or whether you will or not, for I am a plain man -- I'll tell you something about it before we go any further.'

Mr. Harthouse would be charmed.

"Don't be too sure of that," said Bounderby. "I don't promise it. First of all, you see our smoke. That's meat and drink to us. It's the healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the lungs. If you are one of those who want us to consume it, I differ from you. We are not going to wear the bottoms of our boilers out any faster than we wear 'em out now, for all the humbugging sentiment in Great Britain and Ireland."

By way of "going in" to the fullest extent, Mr. Harthouse rejoined, "Mr. Bounderby, I assure you I am entirely and completely of your way of thinking. On conviction."

"I am glad to hear it," said Bounderby. "Now you have heard a lot of talk about the work in our mills, no doubt. You have? Very good. I'll state the fact of it to you. It's the pleasantest work there is, and it's the lightest work there is, and it's the best-paid word there is. More than that, we couldn't improve the mills themselves, unless we laid down Turkey carpets on the floors. Which we're not a-going to do."

"Mr. Bounderby, perfectly right."

"Lastly," said Bounderby, "As to our Hands. There's not a Hand in this town, Sir, man, woman or child, but has one ultimate object in life. That object is, to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. Now they're not a-going -- none of 'em -- ever to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. And now you know the place."

- "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens, Page 118-9


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"The basket packed in silence, they brought her bonnet to her, and smoothed her disordered hair, and put it on. Then they pressed about her, and bent over her in very natural attitudes, kissing and embracing : and brought the children to take leave of her."

The One Thing Needful

"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else."

Illustration for the opening passages of Charles Dickens' "Hard Times", which is in fact my next big project. Now you know! I am terribly excited to be tackling something this hefty, and equally pleased that now I can talk about it.

I read this book in the blink of an eye over Christmas. In fact I gobbled up the first eighty pages in the bookstore, laughing aloud in places because it is so delightfully ridiculous. Arguably his most allegorical novel, (and arguably his shortest novel at 277 pages,) I found Hard Times to be a wonderful book to get yourself into Dickens if you've struggled with him before. I had, as he was forced upon me in college. A week or two with this book and he quickly became one of my favorite authors.

I know, boring. That Dickens is a good author is not news. But had you heard of this book before? Is this book news to you? It was news to me. And that puzzled me. I wondered why it wasn't more famous, as light and accessible as it is. It's what really sparked my interest in painting these pictures in the first place -- to give the book a lift and maybe get it out there to a wider audience.

Well -- I also wanted to make paintings because I couldn't stop drawing pictures in the margins of my copy. The book begs to be illustrated. Many people already have. I just felt like we could do with a bit of a modern take.

Many more illustrations to come as you can imagine. In the meantime I leave you here with "Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities", surveying "the inclined plane of little vessels...ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim."

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I think a lot of people feel this way whilst filing out applications of any kind -- employment, public assistance, housing. You have to put a lot of yourself into them, particularly if you want them to be good. And you do, don't you? Of course you do. You must do your very best. And because of that it takes a lot out of you.

To counteract this I try to remember to fill myself back up. The zoo has been a great helper for me in this department (see previous entry). Making these cookies at long last also helped, immensely. Making lots of loose, happy colorful pictures helps. All sorts of things help.

Just as swimsuits tend to arrive in the stores just when you are finally in the thick of hat and gloves season, seed catalogs seem to arrive during the part of the year where the ground is either frozen solid or a churning quagmire of mud and rain.

I suppose it makes sense in a certain way -- you'd want everything all ready to go when it's time to plant. This year I am going to do as my gardener here and try my hand at starting seeds inside. I've not much natural light here at Chez Kumquat, so I'm not sure how successful I'll be.



When I was working out the details for this painting I got a little bit obsessed with egg cartons. They aren't a huge point of focus here, but when you abstract and simplify as I do you have to work a lot on how to abstract and what to simplify. I spent almost a week with my big pad of paper and a big paintbrush playing with egg cartons.

I think egg cartons would be an excellent exercise for people just beginning to paint and draw. It's a relatively simple-seeming object (we see them all the time, we scoff and think Oh, this won't be a problem. Everyone knows what an egg carton looks like.) but has a lot of surprising nooks and crannies that don't line up the way you'd expect them too.

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My first two paintings of 2012 were these little commissions for a friend-of-a-friend's son and daughter. I was still on the brownish paper kick. It's quietly thrilling to put your usual colors on a new background. New colors will suddenly step forward and bask in the limelight, and you're never quite sure which it will be.

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One of the many interesting things on my desk is a little orange box filled with even litter wooden blocks. I got them initially thinking they'd be fun to play with -- because who doesn't love blocks -- but for most of their time here they've just sat in the little orange box. Then last weekend I learned that this box was the only thing I had that fit my new business cards. (Sorry blocks, we can't be going around handing out business cards all bent and bag-linty.) For a week now the blocks have been floating around my desk, and I'm lucky they have been becuase tonight I learned that they are the BEST thing you could ask for if you are trying to assemble a huge papercut piece.



Once you get much bigger than a single element putting something together like this is a bit daunting. This is a huge non-canvas piece for me -- almost 20" square -- and most of the things were just floating around on the desk. It was incredible comforting to have marks at the edges of where things needed to go, becuase once you start picking things up, layer by layer, once you get to the bottom things look very spare indeed.



But the blocks are there! And by and large you can place things back to where they're supposed to go. Excellent. Thank you, blocks!



And while I have you here, a little about this piece: it is essentially a take on the already complicated omnivore's dilemma. This is actually my personal beef with the movement. I love going into those natural markets becuase they are set up more like art galleries than like grocery stores. I love looking at the food and dreaming. But there is a weird undercurrent of these things are only for the rich when you go to those places. I can get brown rice for $2.99/lb at a boutique market, or I can get brown rice for $0.89/lb at my nearby supermarket. I'm not sure if there's a difference between those rices, they seem like the same quality of rice if you examine the kernels. It seems like it's just more expensive, as if purchasing rice for a dollar more a pound you are somehow fixing the universe with the power of your money.

I should also mention that I think it is totally possible to eat healthy while living under the poverty line. It is not easy to do it if you eat the way Americans are "supposed" to eat, meat-and-three-veg, but if you eat the way most of the world eats (stuff all mixed up in a bowl, legume+grain=a complete protein) then your dollar can get you pretty far. I talk sort of haphazardly about it over here. It takes a population willing to educate the portion of the population who is not fed this information constantly. It's hard work but worth doing. Because otherwise we are just stuck here, with the haves and the have-nots.

OCF: recycle crew

Monday mornings are marked at Chez Kumquat by the recycling truck’s arrival. There’s a lot of truck noises as it maneuvers in between our building and the parked cars, and then a tremendous crash as the items in the blue bins get hoisted then dumped into the truck -- particularly the glass, which is a bright, unmistakable sound.



It’s the same sound one hears in the early morning at the Oregon Country Fair. The recycling crew starts collecting from the recycling kiosks at six in the morning, but they usually don’t make it back to the dock until the public starts to arrive. The first trickle of people at nine increases to a steady stream by eleven, and all the while that familiar sound of glass crashing can be heard echoing through the trees.

Because it’s the same sound I think people assume that a machine is doing all the work, despite the rustic nature of the fairgrounds. It’s what that sound makes us think of. There’s nothing in that sound to suggest otherwise. I think they picture big truck lifters, conveyors, and automated sorting by weight. Neat boxes ready for the reprocessing center.

But don’t you believe it.



What sounds like objects heading to a sorting-machine on a conveyor is in fact two people dumping a barrel full of cans, glass and plastic bottles onto a slanted grid. This grid sits over a channel, designed to catch all the wet and broken debris. (That’s the idea anyway.) This great pile is then pushed with a rake towards the waiting arms of the sorters, who stand along the sides of wooden chutes. And, armed with not much else besides earplugs and eyeglasses, the sorters pick through the mess and sort everything, one by one.



It’s a lot of material to go through. Material that has been sloshing around with leftover contents and whatever else ends up in the barrels. Soon the dock itself is covered in a wet sheen of “sloosh”, and it is for this reason sorters are outfitted with aprons, to keep at least some of it at bay. (Honestly I found working in a raincoat to be the most successful.)

Each kind of object that is sorted follows different rules. Cans are done by size, roughly, and until you memorize which cans are redeemable and which are not, you must read those little letters on the side. Glass is done by size, one box for this size, one box for that, a special box for sessions and a special box for corona and other Mexican style bottles. These boxes, when full, are closed up and handed off to the people standing up on the dock, who load them into the great big truck bed, to be hauled away at the end of the week.

All this while the surge of cans and glass is pushed towards you. More and more all the time. If you do not help and push the pile down the line things get backed up and crash to the floor, or roll under the dock to the dark inaccessible places -- later to be picked up by diligent individuals with buckets.



Meanwhile, plastics are sorted on the other end of the dock. Plastics are the least uniform and most incomprehensible of the sorted items. Sorted mostly by size (which is difficult to judge at a glance, for all the different shapes), but always driven by whether it is redeemable or not. Just about everything aside from plastic water bottles and soda bottles are not redeemable, with a few maddening exceptions. And until you've a sense for it, each item must be examined. And then thrown to the appropriate bag.

Aside from a few dedicated souls there is no specific crew for sorting. Everyone takes a turn. As each truck backs towards the dock, members of the truck’s team hop out to either dump barrels, rake things, or don glasses and earplugs and take their place in the sort line and get to work.

It is the most chaotic, effective little operation I have ever experienced. In a way it’s indicative of how the entire fair works. Very analogue. We may have several powerstrips at the dock for cell phones -- and many of those are future-phones -- but all the real work is done the old fashioned way. With hands and arms and good music and camaraderie.

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OCF: moments

I often embellish things to make them look a little more amazing, but this is absolutely a true story. It's a little more subdued actually, since I think he was also wearing cat's eye sunglasses, and you also do not see the rest of the crew with buckets scanning the ground for cigarette butts. I hasten to add that the truck was not moving when he did this, he was just waiting for the driver to get back and move the truck closer to the kiosk.

In the mornings the various truck crews went to service the various kiosks throughout the fairgrounds. This means rolling full barrels to the truck, lifting the barrels up onto the truck bed, and handing off empty barrels to waiting arms (or, more often, yelling BARREL DOWN as you drop on over the side, with a satisfying gooong) to replace the full barrels. Taking inventory. Make any changes (do we need another cans & glass barrel out here?) Then for the main stages the crew gets buckets and combs the field for trash. Cigarette butts, bottle cabs, paper fragments, and even -- gulp -- condoms.

I forget the exact number of trucks-and-crews we had, but it must have been something like fifteen. Certain routes were so full that they were broken down into types of refuse: compost on one truck, paper, cans and glass on another. Shifts started at six in the morning and sometimes wouldn't finish until eleven.

While they did this I wandered the fairgrounds in awe of the birdsong and relative silence. One delicious morning though I was sitting in the meadow at the far east of the property. It's a high-traffic area, and that morning it was also occupied by a lot of sloppy still-drunk vendors or crew people easing themselves into the new day. Their rhythm was stilted and unstable. Uncertain.

So it was a treat to watch Ceder's truck, Mothra come trundling into the field. Mothra is one of many ancient trucks the recycling crew uses to cart barrels. It takes its cue from the 1920's and is a flatbed truck with wooden boards nailed to the sides to accommodate loads. I am fairly vague here in the painting but that's becuase I can't remember the make and model of the truck itself, and I didn't spend much time with the trucks. And there aren't many pictures online. The public really likes Godzilla, because it has toys on it and breathes fire, but there are many other trucks. Mothra is one of them.

You know a recycling crew truck (or forklift) right away because it has a lot of gloved people hanging off of it. And as soon as it stops the occupants hop off smartly and get to work. They were such a wonderful sight, and probably a really strange pill to swallow for the bleary-eyed non-recyclers in the field. It made me proud. Yes, we are unkept and have a really ragtaggle band of workers. But by God we can get stuff done.

UNSORTED FAIR THOUGHTS

1. During the first meal I had at the staff kitchen we ended up at a bench with a great loose board on the top. Fortunately we were sitting with members of construction crew, and they fixed the thing right there on the spot.

2. Despite the relative chaos of the thing I only lost two things. The biggest loss were my beloved yoga/PJ pants. They weren’t particularly grand -- in fact they were bought after I’d forgotten mine on the move to Portland (silly chilly AC filled hotel rooms.) They were made of an organic bamboo-rendered jersey knit but purchased from Wal-Mart. I’d cut off about 5 inches from the bottom so they were hobbit-pants, unhemmed so they were a bit ragged, had bleach speckles on them from that one time I cleaned that one house, so they really wouldn’t look like anything much to anyone but me. I should have written my name in them -- really I just should have done what sensible people do and checked in with lost and found. But instead I lamented, and then resolved to make some new ones. I know they’ve got similar knits at the fabric store.

2a. The other lost thing was a towel, and we replaced that on the way home. Bath Towels is bath towels.

3. I keep mentioning that being around the recycling crew was a bit like hanging around the muppets, and I’m not lying. For a start, stuff like this guy hula-hooping on the hood of the truck kept happening. But in other ways also:

3a. The crew is not just for those strong enough to lift full barrels (really, no one person can do that. It takes two.) There are many different people-shapes, and people-types in the family. Crews were not really organized as such, but there were some trends. The delicate smallest ones (particularly those on "teen crew") tended to be the extras pulled in during the glass and plastic sorts when the trucks came back to the dock. Big beefy people tended to work at compost or on other non-truck-crew projects like fixing trucks or building things. And the biggest one of all -- an Amazonian with a knee brace -- was the lady who took everything we sorted in boxes and packed the trucks that went to the redeem-the-recyclables places at the end of the week.


3b. The weird collection of dilapidated trucks, which were often painted and made awesome.

3c. We had a house band. Or what amounts to one. A member of the Conjugal Visitors was a friend-of-someone's, and so they were there at our first night of camping, and then again at the cocktail party, and then again for a different non-party fireside night, and THEN at the week-after party at someone's house. Whenever we were together and not working, they seemed to be there. It was lovely. Good high-energy bluegrassy stuff.

3d. The fierce loyalty and sense of “all for one and one for all” that I’ve never, ever seen so strong in a group.

4. There was a spider in the tent, and he was clever clever. Our tent is a minimalist sort of affair, a new take on the old-school pup tent. It's basically a tarp-shelter with a little floor. The floor and ceiling are separate elements. Condensation drips down onto the ground outside keeping the floor and interior dry. Genius. Only drawback is it basically acts like a bug trap. We usually have a cloud of things flying around in the top, but you know. You're camping. So who cares. Though in future we may rent to a spider on purpose, because the cloud of bugs was significantly, immediately diminished when the spider moved in. The few that remained cowered on the far side and did not make much trouble.

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There's something about lots of people working together that I really find compelling. They're all doing different things, but it's all part of the bigger picture. If each were working on his own it would take much longer. And each can work according to his abilities: farm stock can lift the slabs of concrete, anemic bookworms can scoot stones, can plant the vegetables. Can paint signs.

This is my last submission for the cyborg book, and it's bittersweet. Truthfully I could have worked for several more (full) days on this picture and would have liked to. But it's also been a long time (a couple months longer than it was originally), and it was time. Things were delivered, paperwork was signed, last minute tensions were graciously ignored, and another piece of this chapter comes to a close.

Weirdly: the end of this project, much like the end of the last project, does not feel like a completion so much as a surrender. That's not the most satisfying of feelings. Anthony was doing happy dances for me and all I can feel right now is drained. I wonder if that feeling ever goes away, or if it's the mark of a brave artist to keep slogging through those feelings and carry on.

In any case, if this becomes a regular thing with me it would behoove me to have an exit strategy. When you fall and skin your knee you have a method, right? You check for debris, swab, apply pressure, disinfect, affix a bandage. External things we have down pat. What about internal things? That's harder. If I get overwhelmed with anxiousness or frustration, I usually try and get outside and bring nothing with me. Or play with blocks. Or watch something light and silly. Revisit the children's book shelf here on the floor with a quilt. There are many things I do. This isn't a fix the sad situation though, this is a you finished! feeling that I'm just not having yet. I need a ritual to signal the switching of gears. A new playlist, for sure. I am embarrassed to admit how important playlists become for some of my activities, though maybe you'll remember my day job is housecleaning, and I spend a LOT of time with my iPod. I have a "to battle" playlist, to get hyped up for big houses (and, originally, to get myself psyched up for a job interview). I have a "down and out in Portland" playlist, with the Hobbit theme and the Happiness Hotel and old songs about how money doesn't by the clear blue sky -- a playlist I play when I'm feeling broke and need to not feel down about it. Light driving, (for Sundays), heavy driving (for blowing-off-steam times), an hour of really energetic stuff called "Clean up this mess". But I don't have anything for a victory lap. So probably my finishing ritual can start there.

In small ways I have tried to signal that we are back to a clean slate: the huge stack of sketches has been moved from my desk to a sorting pile near my desk. The interminable checklist is gone and in it's place a lovely blank sheet of paper waits patiently for instructions.

And of course this time I have a very clear pallet-cleanser: we are as I speak packing up for the Oregon Country Fair, and for the next week will be in the forest with all the other muppets having a grand old time. I think nothing will wash the dear robots out of my head like a week of port-a-potties and forest time.

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From doodle...



To picture...

I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but the protagonist of the "what IS Cyborg Anthropology?" entry is actually someone who existed. I got hold of some genealogy papers a while back and became enamored with the old-timey photos of the various relations who sailed to America from Ireland. Many of them were very fun and plain looking in a dated way, and I used a few of them in some quickies that I posted to flickr. In particular:



Edmund John, son of



Mary-Anne Clarke.

"Edmund" has been a Wheelahan namesake ever since. I don't see Avonia here in my sketches, but I believe she was the same generation as Mary-Anne, also married into the family. I am very curious about her and of course there is little to go on. Avonia. That doesn't sound like an Irish name. Possibly where the gypsy blood came in?

At any rate, something about Mary-Anne's stern brow and frumpiness made her a natural for my cyborg-y explanation, because I needed someone who wasn't young and intimidating. She's done very well, so much so that we are letting her tell even more of her story.



You will not see that here because we will be releasing it as it's own booklet, which is terribly exciting to me. It also means I need to hurry up and finish the rest of it.

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Pictures and unrelated words

SPEAKING OF NOTHING, LET’S LEARN TO SPELL THESE WORDS:

silhouette

refrigerator

simultaneous

miscellaneous

engine

fuchsia

conscience

conscientious

squirrel

Of these I can consistently spell “miscellaneous” correctly, because I used to work in classifieds and during the summer we transcribed a lot of garage sale ads. They were a package deal and had no real line limit, so we took great pleasure in spelling things out. I can also spell “fuchsia” correctly now because of Randall’s color test.

Last week (when updating the Supermodernity post) I had to google the phrase “give a little whistle” to confirm the spelling of “conscience”, which I used to know for sure because one can think of it as “con-science” and that’s fine. But I’d suddenly wondered if I had that tangle of letters mixed up with “conscientious” which is really not the same sort of word in modern usage. It is itself composed of letters that don’t seem to match up with the sounds. Kawn-chee-ehn-chus. “Con-” is fine, and “-tious” at the end is almost acceptable because of other adjectives that seem easier (luminous, pretentious). It’s that chee-ehn part that gets me. Must think of a clever way of remembering that...