Goodnight sweet Bizzy

The green-grape obsessed, tennis-ball-loving, determined and obstinate burrower under beds Bizmark gave up the ghost on Sunday. The central air conditioning vent in the floor of the kitchen won't be the same without his long furry snout upon it. Rest in peace, Biz. We're all going to miss you so much, and already do!



Read more about this beloved canine here.

Another great photography project

Photographer Yeondoo Jung did a series in 2005 called "Wonderland," where he made photographs of children's drawings.

Why doesn't everyone do this everywhere, all the time?!







You can see more here.

(And when I say "another great photography project," I'm thinking of Irina Werning's series Back to the Future, the recreated childhood photos I posted about in February. It will be a very, very long time before I recover from the crazy brilliance of her idea and its execution. If in fact I ever do.)

The power of hyphenation

Stretch...now hold it

Ever since I got that book...

The birds

Here's a chaser to my previous post, which could be viewed as kind of a downer.



Fancy pigeons!



These are just some of the esteemed winners of the National Pigeon Association's 2010 championship. In other words, those grubby gray flying animals we city dwellers live with have some very impressive relatives.



Frank gave me the book Extraordinary Chickens a few years ago; could Extraordinary Pigeons be next?



Yes, yes, by all means, yes.

Not that I'm a believer in these my-bird-is-better-than-your-bird contests.



My favorite bird of all time is Cocky Bennett. I xeroxed these pages out of a book I found in the Beverly Hills Library lo, so many years ago.



I didn't write down any information about the book and unfortunately the internet doesn't seem to have caught up with Cocky's fame and importance. But go ahead and read page 116...you'll get the idea.

Everything is

Well, except for the super cool Wrong! pin I stumbled on, on ebay.



And the candle Dao gave me this week, that I will never, ever burn.

But man. Sometimes I just gotta tell it like it is.

Was she leading them back to the arctic?

I hope so. (And of course, I wish I'd been in her shoes!)

Why not

Homeless stylin'

I came across this article about a recent contest in the current issue of Threads magazine. The challenge was to take this pattern and "take it to extremes," and below is one of the winner's responses.



It's a very clever and successful solution. Maybe it's just the magazine's presentation of it that I find so bizarre and funny.



The smiling, copper-haired model showing us what to sew for ourselves (or have our mom sew for us) if we're homeless...the coat can be rolled up and worn as a backpack during the day when you're panhandling, or unrolled and turned into a sleeping bag at night. There are even pockets in the coat you can put newspapers and books in, for extra warmth on those freezing-cold nights when you curl up outside instead of at a homeless shelter (because you've had such unfortunate episodes at homeless shelters).

What you can do with felt

A couple years ago there was a great show in the windows on Broadway and 10th street that made my sneakers SCREE-EE-TCH to a stop as I walked by.



I thought I'd lost the cell phone pics I took of the exhibit when I recently traded in my phone. "Oh my god! What if I never see those crazy felt heads on bloody sticks again?" I was so relieved when I was able to retrieve them.



Look at that eyeball! It reminds me of the finger puppet I got for my nephew last year.



It was a ridiculous thing to worry about because in this modern era, what information is ever lost? All I had to do was type "felt heads impaled on posts" into you know, that search engine, to find info about the show and the artist, Adam Parker Smith. And tons of images of his work.



IT'S SUCH AMAZING STUFF!



WHAT'S GOING ON WITH THESE POOR, UNFORTUNATE FELT PEOPLE?



Even when they seem to be OK...they don't seem that OK.



Adam Parker Smith, I salute you. Even though I was kind of disappointed to find out that you're not a woman.

The beautiful music Ikea inspires

If you've ever had a hard time putting together an item from a certain Swedish company, as I did recently, and then finally had success to some degree but are pretty certain you're going to wake up to a pile of particle board on your bathroom floor someday soon anyway, you'll enjoy this video.

It's pretty fun for everyone else, too.

Changed much?

Only the vunderful and vantastic Lee Ann (no, she doesn't have a funny accent, I just velt like adding the veez) could wake me from my blogging slumber by bringing this incredible project to my attention.



Argentinian photographer Irina Werning is recreating people's childhood photos with pictures of them today in the same or similar outfits, locations, and positions. Whaaaat?! She writes that this effort has made her realize she's a bit obsessive, so I guess it takes as much organization and attention to detail to set up these shots as I imagine they do. Bonkers. Click here to see them all. Thanks, Westover.

My proudest achievement

As opposed to the bacward roll.

La Nana

This is an excellent movie. It kind of knocked me out.



It's smart, funny, fascinating, moving, multi-layered, a brilliant character study.... I mean, part of my excitement over this, I'm sure, has to do with being shocked and relieved it's not the formulaic, simplistic piece of crap I kind of expect recently made movies to be these days. See it if you're interested, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Instant holiday de-stressor

Another pastel

Here's Adam, who was trying hard not to fall asleep while he sat for us. He'd been posing for different artists since 9:30 in the morning and had been up most of the night before with his 3-year-old, watching the first snow and playing with dinosaurs. So the intensity you see above is him saying to himself, "Must. Keep. Eyes. Open!"

Blue

I've been sitting in on a pastel class at the National Arts Club lately. Pastels? What? I know, that's what I said to myself, too, but there was an opening in a class and an invitation and in the midst of the strange trip the last six months of 2010 have been for me, saying yes was the path of least resistance. Yes to chalky, hard-to-control pastels! Why not! And the surprise is, they're fun. You get to make a big mess. The colors are all very intense and don't only offer up sherbet-y pinks, blues, and greens. It's also the closest thing to painting without using paint, and that's really weird...and fun.



This is Tania, the woman who sat for us on Tuesday night. Tania was awesome. She sat very still for three hours (with a few breaks, of course) and then disappeared downstairs, to the second floor, where there's always some kind of party going on (last week it was a big to-do for Jules Feiffer). She started playing incredibly intense music on the grand piano near the bar down there; it turned out, she's a kick-ass pianist. "Of course," she said, when some of my fellow students expressed surprise. That's what I thought, too, after I listened to her play for awhile: "Of course."

What's your name again?

NYC rite of passage

Staring out the window of a subway's last car and watching the station you just left disappear from sight.