10-20-30- minutes philosophy

I read this book once called 10-20-30- Minutes to Sew, which basically states that you can complete an entire garment even if you only have a few minutes here and there. Well I pretty much have adapted my life to this philosophy of late. I think it has something to do with what my husband calls my "grasshopper mind" or functional a.d.d. I start out blogging, take ten minutes to sew the edges of the pajamas I'm working on, then make a bowl of soup, then blog for a few, then start a load of wash, then out to the studio to set up a glaze session, then back in to the house to wash a tub full of wool, then knit for ten minutes, hang the laundry out to dry, set up the ingredients to make whole grain muffins, blog some more, finish trimming my pots from yesterday, etc.., the only time I really spend a lot of time in one stretch is in the pottery studio because once you put clay clothes on and start getting messy it doesn't make sense to stop every 5 minutes. When you think about it, it harkens back to the time frame segments of the old farm lifestyle; make breakfast, start bread, feed the chickens, collect eggs, feed other livestock, milk the cow, do the laundry, start the seeds. I'm starting to think that a.d.d. is not a dysfunction but an old lifestyle pattern, and that contemporary life is somewhat out of sinc with some our natural rhythms and need for movement and sunlight

Rusty Junk as found Art

found paintings gray

outbuilding remnant

The ghost of Quentin Crisp

Somehow in making my last post I made the youtube video of Quentin Crisp too large. I tried to remedy it by making it smaller, I had to re-post 10 times as I could not delete the first video and then could not reconfigure the smaller one. When I was finally able to reconfigure the video to fit it entirely on the blog in it's smaller format I noticed that my previous post on" my planters" was all changed around as well as a few older posts. The text had been moved and I was unable to reconfigure it to the original look of the post, no matter how many times I tried. I can come to no other conclusion, knowing the grand personality of the late Quentin Crisp, that it was his ghost, informing me that-" no he will not be made smaller, he is bigger than life and must remain that way and if I dare to diminish his image he will mess with mine!" So the legend of Quentin Crisp lives on. Kudos Quentin, you are still bigger than life!

and while I'm on this topic, has anyone else ever felt as I have, that the computer is some kind of Zen master teaching me the nature of non-attachment? When I compose an interesting comment and click to publish it and it disappears and the error script comes up and you have to start all over again, or when you are trying to put the lines of a poem in a certain order, and the blogger program wont comply, and you try and move photos around and the program simply moves them back? Is this what non attachment is all about or do I just need another program or better skills?

Bicycle man, N.Y.C. revisited-story fragment

Bicycle man and I lived in a 3000sq ft ground floor loft in the East village in New york city.This was when rents were still pretty cheap. I worked as a bartender in Chelsea and he was a carpenter who scrounged around for discarded broken furniture that he would fix up and sell out of the loft on weekends. Bicycle man had a tandem bike that we would ride on with me in the back, all over new york at night, the whizz and whirl of traffic and colors and flashing neon lights coupled with the fear and danger of squeezing in between cars was exhilarating, and heightened the effect of the visual imagery that softened and blended together in a liquid manner that resembled a blurred painting.It was a Bohemian life we led, with a big picnic table for a kitchen table that all sorts of eccentric characters would stop in, and pass through, and chat away the evening over tea or beers. We both had our own eccentricities, I wore very brightly colored clothing in an attempt to brighten away my inner emotional deadness, my brightly colored clothing really bothered his environmentalist sensibilities, but we agreed to disagree. He was a vegetarian who fed his cats expensive premium tuna from the Big Apple Supermarket, and was so environmentally conscious that when he sent me out for coffee I had to bring his own mug for them to fill, and I was such an artist that I liked the Greek printed paper coffee cups and had to have my coffee in them or I wouldn't want it at all. He had a dog that he believed should be free, even though we lived in the city. He'd let it roam off leash and it once ate some kind of corruption and grew sicker and sicker and I told him "you need to take the dog to the vet" and he said it would heal from it's own natural healing powers, and I'd sit on the floor with the dog in my lap stroking it's weakened head, and he kept saying if it doesn't get better in the next few days he'd take it to the vet and it wasn't my dog or my decision and I was young and he was older than I was and the dog didn't get better and it died. We were two different people, roommates, friends, but we had a love for the bohemian life. There were improvisational music jams and dance sessions in the open room we had in the back . Other people would stop by, people involved in the Living theater and street performance and the jams were fun and took on a life of their own. Bicycle man new Adam Purple, an old man who built what he called "the garden of Eden" on a vacant lot in the lower East side. A huge organic vegetable garden complete with a yin yang symbol in the middle of it. Adam lived in a squat and we had to climb through a window to go into his apartment, and we were like kids going to a friends fort in the city.

I took a lot of dance classes at the Clark Center for the Performing arts and art classes at The New School. There was a Nuyorican poet guy who had kicked drugs and was hanging around a lot and couldn't understand the nature of the feminist art I was making and thought it was all hogwash, and I remember there was an artist at the time, who put a basketball in a fish tank and called it art, and I thought that that was a bunch of hogwash, and there were more people who lived in squats in alphabet city- lower east side. only we we went through padlocked doors to get into their apartment and they had some kind of unauthorized electricity set up and had to take baths in their kitchen sink and I don't remember much more about them other than they were a couple, and friend's of the bicycle man. At the time people were living in tents in Tompkins Square park and it all seemed so odd to me the nature of people and habitation in the city. There was a performance artist named Nam June Paik who spent somewhere's around a whole year living outside in New York as a performance art piece, and I wondered how in the world he got away with that.

There was an old vaudeville actor named Ben who the bicycle man felt sorry for and he'd sometimes let Ben crash out on a trampoline the bicycle man found and kept in the loft. We would drag the trampoline out onto the street at times and the Armenian priests from a local church,with their long beards, dressed in black frocks would come and jump on it and that was a site to behold. I remember seeing Quentin Crisp once in Soho. I was looking at him thinking "what an eccentric fellow that is with his hat with a feather in it, ascot, and colorful dress.I guess I sort of recognized a fellow eccentric only later to have it register in my mind who he was.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VMljsgSK5M&feature=related