If all else fails, I'll just collect flatware.

While I was home in Neenah, WI over the holiday, I hit up one of the good thrift stores looking for small, lightweight things that I might convince myself I could reasonably take back to Oakland with me. Flatware seemed perfectly justifiable; we're always running out of forks and spoons. Especially when I found so many wonderful pieces, it was nearly impossible to resist. And at 20 cents a piece, sometimes less, they fell well within my very limited unemployed spending limit. I used to buy all the same ones, but then found it too painful to ignore the lone knife or fork that happened to be perfect except for its mismatching. So now I have a motley bundle of silverware in our drawer and they seem pretty happy.

These are the newest bundles of joy. I happened to find an odd group of seven pieces of one pattern packaged together; a handsome set of simple, mod elegance.

My Daily Purchase? A Load of Laundries.

I found out about this lady named Kate Bingaman-Burt from a youtube video I was watching recently. It turned out to be the culmination of all these things that keep recurring in my life lately: a Pecha Kucha presentation (these are so hypey right now and crazy!) given by Faythe Levine (awesome documentarian from Mil-Waukee) featuring these drawings. Maybe those associations don't make much sense to you, but they did to me. That's the point, they were all orbiting.



Anyway, they are nice little illustrations of just the stuff Kate buys everyday and they appeared in the most recent issue of Readymade Magazine (R.I.P) as well as in Faythe Levine's book, Handmade Nation. Basically she's blowing up right now, her stuff seems to be everywhere and I just finally visited her website and the whole idea of her stuff is perfect. It makes a record, which I love. And its done in this cartoony whimsical way that also calls out the enormous scope of capitalism's consumptive embrace. Reading her blog I further discover that Kate's grandmother also lives in Kenosha, WI, which wins her triple mega bonus points. As if she even needed any. She has a blog and an etsy shop which are very comprehensive.



Bottom line: Obsessive Consumption is smart, silly, super duper.

John's Big Birthday

Actually it started on top of a hill with a bottle of classy champagne. And then descended from there...

...to a Fancy Belgian and a Shouter...

and then a flash of a man and a tasty dinner.

After which we were thoroughly sloshed on food and drink and went to play rummy...

and then there was cake.

The end!

Old Friends

I finally got around to scanning some of the analog photos that I've taken recently. I'm a baby when it comes to knowing how to use a camera, so my success rate is still rather low. So these are nothing special probably to photo buffs, but I feel pretty happy about them. At least in terms of bringing a satisfied feeling for catching something on film, they have achieved it. These come from several rolls of film, the first several from my last dog days of Philadelphia, one from the day of my birthday and one that I've been lugging around here and there and that captured those two of Lauren and Sofi at Dolores Park.



**The ring on that is from the magnet which hangs this one to my refrigerator.oops.




Taking pictures is a new hobby, I expect to post more soon.