So, since the party there have been eventful events in my life, that I would like to tell you about, but can only sort of dance around, since I'm discovering that I'm a very private person. Not a good trait in a blogger, eh?

Above you will see my third and final giantess painting, and I think the best of the three. Now that it is done I can invent a whole new painting style for myself, since this style is giving me a cramp. I need looser brush strokes. Anyone else love Lucien Freud out there? He's Freud's grandson and my favorite living painter. Here is a painting he did when he was my age:



And here's a painting he did when he was in his sixties:



And here's a quote from him:

"I want paint to work as flesh... my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does."

Somewhere in there is what I mean. His earlier painting is like mine: finished, sharp, flat, but somehow emotionally blank. It hides its own making in the smoothness of the paint. But it metamorphosizes into an image of writhing, unruled, impassioned impasto. (Sorry, so silly, alliteration.) In the later painting each visible brush stroke seems to call out "I'm paint and I'm flesh at the same time! Art is illusion, like all attraction!"

This is a metaphor for what has been going on with me, which I can't tell you about, because I'm too private. See, secretly, I'm like the giantess, or want to be. Larger than life, beautiful and powerful, yes. But also isolated and out of place in the landscapes. She doesn't quite fit, literally. She towers and the world, she wishes, cowers. And even though she's naked, is it sexy? Or is it somehow cold, physical in the clinical sense, as if she is in the "physical world" of seventh grade earth science. There's not much passion in her, or in me for that matter. I'm too much like my brushstrokes: taut, controlled, avoiding artifice. While all the while artifice is what makes art, what makes art beautiful.

Hey Folks: While this is not up to the minute information really, here are some pics from the (e:strip) (e:mike) & (e:terry) birthday party. The pics are pretty dark, so some of the delay was me correcting them in Photoshop as much as I could. I refuse to use the flash, but don't really have enough options on my camera to make up for it. Oh well. The shapes are still pretty cool. Maybe some of the photographers out there can offer advice?
Side note: (e:paul), can you make a way for us to do a whole folder upload though. Adding pictures one by one can be a pain. Heh heh. Knowing the programmer has its privileges...

Last night I went over to my friend Maria's house to watch old Bette Davis movies, including "Now, Voyager" which was excellent, and then something where she played two twins, and one was good and one was bad, and the bad one got the man, but then she drowned and, you can guess the rest...

Maria is one of the most fascinating people I've met in Buffalo. We used to work together at the bookstore, and we hit it off pretty much right away. She went to the same college as my sister, Mount Holyoke, and then to Oxford! She's still trying to finish her dissertation on Russian literature. Sometimes she's so smart my brain hurts.

We've been hanging out for awhile, but I've only recently started going to her house. It's amazing. It's like a curiousity shoppe frozen in time. Her grandparents lived in it, and little has changed about it since the early forties. Supposedly they used to have grande fetes there, which you can still almost hear when standing in the large arch-ceilinged hall. The house was originally owned by Buffalo architect E.B. Green, who had the wood panels for the hall brought over from Italy. They're from the Renaissance. Last night between movies Maria let me take some photos, since I've tried to describe the place and just can't put it into words.

The TV room. You can't see it, but Bette's on the tube acting dramatic:


Two ladies:


Two gentlemen:


The main hall (front and back ends side by side):


A Steiff puppy the children used to ride on:


Yup. Suit of armor:


A portrait of Maria's mother when she was young. They also had some Edwin Dickinson paintings of her aunt and uncle when they were little, but the picture didn't come well:


P.S. To all you cat burglers out there, I'm not telling you where this house is. Who says cat burgler anymore?! That's just the kind of antique feeling this place gives you...

Bllomberg is offering discounts for peaceful protestors!

"Unfortunately, we can't stop an anarchist from getting a button,"

I agree with Ajay 100% in his rejoinder [inlink]ajay,88[/inlink] to Paul's post [inlink]paul,1820[/inlink] on what Paul considers unsavory or even dangerous information on the internet. I thought it was so wrong I was just gonna let it pass on by... so thanks Ajay for an evenhanded response. Not sure if you mentioned this, but all Google is is a catalogue. It should be as indiscriminate as possible to the actual contents of documents, and instead limit its catagorization to user activities like linking, etc. Google should be content blind. It's the same as the library. If I were to say that the Anarchist Cookbook or Mein Kamp should not be allowed in the library, then honestly folks, Henry Miller and Huck Finn aren't far behind. Just because the delivery method, facilitated by technology, has changed, the argument about a free press hasn't. The spirit, if maybe not the letter, of the law is the same. You may not like it, but the hope is that the society is healthy enough to buffer itself against the wackjobs who want to use information contained in books like these to harm people. Do you really think it's a terroroist handbook that creates terrorists? Not, say, years of neocolonialist economic policies and one-sided (non)diplomacy? It's not the library or search engine's job to police people's thoughts, it's the police's job (and by that I mean other civic safetynet institutions, I'm just going for the pun here) to protect not only our lives, but our rights to think and write freely.