Grandma Leeth’s
February 28, 2009
- Restaurant website
- Location: SW Portland almost to Beaverton, just off HW26
- Price to dine two people: About $40
Say there’s this BIG landslide, and the daycare center crashes into the organic restaurant, picks up speed and piles into IKEA. I think they’d call the result “Grandma Leeth’s.”
Robyn and I had a quiet dinner there the other night. It was quiet because, aside from the hostess and our waitress, we were the only signs of life in the place.
She sleeps with the fishes
February 28, 2009
For $6,495, you can be the marine equivalent of a Christmas tree topper.
Eternal Reefs will take your cremated remains, mix them with concrete, pour them into a mold, add a bronze plaque and sink it into the sea. Voila! A coffin that’s also a coral reef.
Teasing the tiger
February 27, 2009
An elderly woman’s cigarette strays too close to the flexible plastic hose feeding oxygen into her lungs. A flash, a flare, and her home goes up in smoke.
Tempting fate. Teasing the tiger.
Her credit cards were declined. The gauge on her bank account hovers relentlessly over zero. With no job, no prospects of one and unemployment running out, she has no business trying on $300 boots. “I’ll take them,” she decides, “You take checks, right?”
Tempting fate. Teasing the tiger.
She cradles her tender, swollen cheek with one hand while the other punctuates her words. He’s lazy. Filthy. Good-for-nothing. Ignores his narrowing eyes, the hammer clenched and drawn back to strike.
Tempting fate. Teasing the tiger.
Why can’t we resist teasing the tiger? Is it because our outraged sensibilities insist that this sort of thing only happens to other people? Or because we know it only happens to us, and so we hasten the plunge, hoping to get it over with, to find the sunshine on the other side?
I’m sitting here, browsing through the local news, wondering what the hell is happening to us. There seems to be a run on angry tigers, and the queue to whisker-tweak grows long and longer. Some snake oil salesman told us the laws of common sense no longer apply, and it looks like we believed him.
Despite the economy, contributions were climbing: $11,000 and more coming in. No one expected that much and it was all thanks to her hard work. Christmas is coming, the kids need so much, and by the time anyone notices she’ll have it all paid back…
Tempting fate. Teasing the tiger.
Sigh.
Oliver Wendell Kiln, world traveler
February 27, 2009
When embarking on a career as an artist, it’s important to have a well-traveled kiln. And so Oliver Wendell, my new kiln, appears to be taking the long way home.
In December, after enough kiln travails to fill a book, I bought a kiln from Olympic. They kindly belled and whistled it for my particular casting needs. (more detail if I ever get to actually turn the dratted thing on)
Naturally, a week or so later I had no place to put it. Among other things, I’d discovered that sculpture is my life and my life is turning my house into a superfund site. My house issued an ultimatum: “Stop with the casting, dump all that plaster/fiberglass/rubber crud and clean the wax off the ceiling, or we’re through!”
I called the realtor that afternoon.
Kindling myths
February 26, 2009
Just read Roy Blount Jr’s worries over Amazon’s new Kindle 2 in the NYT. Apparently its text-to-speech feature will kill the audiobook business, destroying the livelihoods of all writers for centuries to come.
Oh for heaven’s sake. Has Mr. Blount actually HEARD text-to-speech? Or an audiobook? (Despite his claims to the contrary, I doubt it.) Comparing TTS to an actor’s performance on an audiobook is a bit like comparing a rock to a Ferrari: Both roll down the hill, but that’s about it.
Absolutely, positively proves the old adage: Write about stuff you know.
Authors’ livelihoods are in jeopardy for many reasons: Books are being subsumed by the Web, reading ain’t exactly in fashion, recession-caused advertising woes are killing writing jobs right and left, newspapers are dying. And the head of the Writer’s Guild chooses to spend his precious NYT op-ed space on the Kindle?
Give me a break. And somebody elect a new guild president.
Glasslanders who AIN’T cool…
February 25, 2009
…missed a terrific Oregon Glass Guild meeting tonight with veteran glassist Roger Thomas. The guy gives great slideshow and incidentally makes pretty gorgeous glass. The presentation he gave pretty much amounted to a history of glass panel work in the US for the last 30-40 years.
See what you miss if you’re not going to OGG meetings regularly? The Guild is growing and getting more interesting all the time. It’s probably the best time a glassist can have for $2.92.*
And next month promises more of the same: Glass lathe virtuoso Andy Paiko–the guy who was on TV not too long ago–will be strutting his working glass spinning wheel, seismograph, chairs and other cool stuff for OGG. The meeting will be held at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in downtown Portland, doubling your opportunity to see neat craft.
What?!? You aren’t a member? What are you waiting for? Fill out this form, write OGG a check for thirty-five bucks and send it in!!
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*Guild membership dues are $35 per year so that would make this $2.92 per great meeting…assuming you don’t count all the other events and stuff
Smooth-on Trowelable Plasti-Paste
February 23, 2009
There are times when a mother can be a real pain in the neck (and no, I’m not talking about you, Mom).
I’m talking mother as in “mother mold,” the hard shell that supports the flexible silicone or rubber mold you’ve made of your model when casting glass. (Yeah, yeah, I know that in SOME places the mother mold refers to the entire mold structure, but here in the Northwest I’ve been corrected so much I’m giving in and just referring to the rigid support shell.)
Without a mother, your lovely silicone mold collapses into utter flaccidity. That’s great if you want to manipulate your silicone into different shapes (and you don’t mind burning your fingers with hot wax). But if you’re reproducing a model exactly you want the daggone silicone to stay put.
Shortening Oscar
February 22, 2009
Oscars night, and who the heck cares about all those silly, overpriced full-length features (except maybe Slumdog but I’m not going there). Naaaaah, the REAL action is in animation. It’s almost anybody’s game, for once, and that’s fun to see.
Coralina moooooon, I’m calling…
February 19, 2009
(sorry, couldn’t resist)
Tonight I was up for animation (when am I not up for animation?) and the Portland International Film Festival had its last showing of Bill Plympton’s Idiots and Angels…so Kat and I headed downtown to catch it. They were unfortunately sold out, so we wound up at Coraline instead. (And no, I am NOT misspelling Caroline. Go read the book.)
Marvelous film. Highly recommend it.
Helvetica
February 18, 2009
Editors and designers are often on opposite sides of the fence. Editors get really ticked off when the art directors reduce the copyspace, while designers fume over extra words messing up their nice layout. That tension creates the best visual communication.
And that’s pretty much what’s behind the documentary Helvetica. Nominally an homage to the Helvetica typeface, it’s also a balanced look at the history of modern design and its influences. Somehow it manages to both elevate the need for good visual design in commonplace things and knock down a heckuva lot of pretense.
Now, if you think it’s weird to worry about the politics of Helvetica, or the termination of its descenders, this may not be the film for you. But me, I’m a typeface freak (note that I didn’t say FONT–they are NOT the same thing), and I got teary in places.
It’s been out about 18 months now, so I’m coming late to the party and a lot of you have probably already seen it. But if you haven’t, it’s worth checking out. Nice stuff.