Dating myself

Yesterday I indulged in what my friend June termed an art date with myself. R. Crumb's Genesis drawings are on display at the Art Museum, and I wanted to hear what chief curator Bruce Guenther had to say about this icon of my misspent youth. He lectured for an hour, engagingly, before turning us loose in the exhibit. A little over a year ago, The New Yorker published an excerpt of Crumb's work; I happened to lay my iPhone on the opening page, floating in God's void.


Crumb spent five years researching and illustrating all 50 chapters of Genesis. Granted, a Bible chapter is, what, a few paragraphs at most? -- it was still a lot of material to absorb. I'd figured I'd cruise through and look at the drawings, maybe read a bit of the text when something caught my interest. But damned if the story didn't suck me in, even the begats, over and over again. Genesis is juicy material, and Crumb, (Mr.) naturally, illustrated some of the begettings. Of course, the book was for sale in the museum gift shop, but I didn't want to schlep it all over town and on public transportation (I'd taken the bus in). It is a must-purchase, though. My birthday's coming up; just saying.

A wall-size Sol LeWitt piece was in the final stages of installation in the main-floor sculpture gallery. It consists of six primary geometic shapes superimposed on each other in pairs, white on a black ground, in all possible permutations. Very simple, but it grabbed me in a cool, rational, satisfying way. What a totally different aesthetic, and intent, from R. Crumb.


As long as I was going to be downtown anyway, I'd made a Genius Bar appointment to have my iPhone, which has been hiccuping since I "upgraded" to OS4, diagnosed. I had a couple of hours to fill before then, and I was hungry (must have been all that begetting). Southpark, one of our favorite default downtown restaurants, is just down the street from the museum. It was a gorgeous day, and they had tables set up on the sidewalk. So I ordered lunch and spent an hour or so eating a tuna salad sandwich and reading the book I'd brought with me.

A California friend had emailed me about a local gallery show featuring the work of two artists she knew, so I walked down 9th, across Burnside, and a few more blocks to the venue. En route I saw this conceptual art installation. Only in Portland, I hope.
With a couple of exceptions, the paintings (small format watercolor abstracts) didn't engage me. The gallery next door, though -- this is in the Pearl District, which is art-scene central -- had an intriguing exhibit centered on the graphic representation of editing, literary analysis, cultural history, and classroom teaching. Highly conceptual, hard to explain, but it spoke to my English major/editor heart. Here's a link: pdxcontemporaryart.com/anna-gray-ryan-wilson-paulsen.

I still had some time before the rendezvous with my Genius, so I dropped into the Contemporary Craft Museum, where I've been a member since shortly after we moved to town. There's usually something intriguing on display. The current exhibit hadn't piqued my interest when I read about it in their newsletter, but in person it was provocative. The title of the show is Dropping the Urn; the artist, from Beijing, is Ai Weiwei (I'm trying to put out of my mind the declarative English sentence that sounds like). He takes centuries-old vases and urns and repaints them, or reproduces their form but with the decorative glaze on the inside, as if they'd been turned inside out, or -- literally iconoclastic -- drops and breaks them. Here's a writeup: www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org/exhibitions/index.php?f=2010_07_weiwei

Finally it was time to hit the Apple Store. I pawed iPads for a short while, and then handed my phone over to Kid Genius. He ran some diagnostics which revealed very little. His advice was to sync the phone (which also does a backup), then do a full reset, which wipes all data and restores the phone to virginity, and then sync to reinstall my data. This is not as scary as it sounds, but I was hoping to avoid having to fiddle with all my settings again; I'd done a Reset without Erase earlier. Of course, today Apple released version 4.0.1 of the software, which might have helped with my problems. "Minor bug fixes" indeed. We'll see.

I left the A-store, resisted checking out the sale at Chico's across the way, and was rewarded, up on the transit mall, with the almost immediate appearance of the 19 bus.

I really should take myself on art dates more often.

Happy Birthday, Sophie

Hard to believe that it's been a year since this little critter attached herself to us while we out walking. She was dirty, disheveled and limping -- not at all like she is in this photo, fresh from a birthday bath. The beginning of the saga is here.

We knew almost nothing about living with dogs, and even less about integrating them into a household ruled by cats. We had no idea how old she was, or even what breed. Her record at the vet, last time I checked, still said "cockapoo mix."

Once we decided to keep her, we declared July 2nd, the day we found her, her birthday. After several months of waffling on the breed question by saying "We dunno; we think she's a Lhasa Apso or maybe a Shih Tzu mix," we sprang for a doggie DNA test. She's almost purebred Lhasa with a touch of Pekinese; the Peke part explains why she's on the small side for a Lhasa, and accounts for all her bad qualities, which are few.

Of course we've grown to love her. The cats would probably choose a somewhat less effusive verb, but still. The video features China Rose, who was so spooked when Sophie joined the family that she hid in the laundry sink for two weeks.

Flipping the mattress: Not a euphemism for anything

I don't think this is what they mean by Sleep Number Mattress (tm), but it's the key to an important ritual in our household. Longer ago than I can remember, the engineer in the family numbered the 4 short edges of our mattress -- head and foot, top and bottom -- consecutively. Every quarter, on the solstice or equinox, we turn and/or flip the mattress so the next number is at the head. When 4's up, we return to 1, and so on ad infinitum. The object of this exercise: even wear, longer life. For the mattress, anyway. Thrilling, I know, but it's one of the quirky little dances we do. I'm sure you have yours. Happy summer.

Thinking Outside the (Vegetable) Bed

Thanks to the towering Port Orford cedar in the southeast corner of our lot, and the mature pink chestnut that dominates the west side, our back yard has grown noticeably shadier in the five years we've lived here. Any given spot in the narrow herb and veggie bed along the south side of the house receives no more than a couple of hours of direct sunlight a day. The yellow climbing rose in the middle of that space is flourishing; it's as tall as the eaves this season, and casts its own shadow on the garden below.

The herbs, most of which are perennials, do fine here. We have more sage and oregano, especially, than we can use. This year I direct-sowed cool weather crops -- lettuces, spinach, beets and snap peas -- from seed in mid-March, and again in early May. I got poor germination from everything but the peas and, so far, very slow growth. It's been a cold, late spring. I'll go back to starts (a.k.a. plantlets) next year, or bite the bullet and find the room/rig up the lighting to start my seeds indoors. I've done it before; I've just gotten lazy (and space has gotten tighter) in recent years.

Given its iffy exposure, it's amazing that I even attempted to grow tomatoes in our backyard. The first year, I had beginner's luck with Brandywines and a couple of other heirlooms. Since then, I've had lackluster results, except from the cherry-type varieties. In retrospect, I realized that my veggie patch has grown progressively more shady over the years; do you think there might be a correlation?

Meanwhile, out front, the sweet gums on our parking strip dropped a few large limbs in various winter storms. Apart from the hassle of having to Deal With It, these losses were not unwelcome. They meant not only less raking, but more sun on the front garden. Last winter also vanquished several large ornamentals, opening up plantable real estate here and there. In early spring I watched the progress of light and shade across the garden, and realized: the tomatoes go in front this year. That's where the sun is; duh. Sometimes I'm a slow learner.

So here's what I'm trying for Tomato Season 2010: The huge black pot in the driveway contains three cherry-types: Sweet Million, Oregon Cherry, and Sun Gold. At this point the tomato cages look delusionally optimistic. The pot itself once housed a camellia that graced the back patio when we bought the house in 2005. I think it was placed there by the sellers to hide a crack in the cement. After we moved in, I transplanted the camellia to the west end of the yard, where it seems happy next to my Marathon Conifer, and stashed the empty pot next to the compost bin. (Sometimes it pays to hang onto stuff.) The pot should be adequate, I'm thinking, for three healthy, mature tomato plants. I set it on a wheeled stand (guaranteed to hold up to 500 pounds) so I can move it around, if necessary, to maximize solar exposure. At this point in the season, the driveway is sunny all day.

On impulse, I bought an EarthBox (tm) on my most recent nursery shopping frenzy. I'm sort of embarrassed about this. It's an expensive piece of plastic, albeit sturdy and well-made. It comes with bags of soil amendments, a watering and drainage system, and an elastic-edged rectangle of black plastic mulch that stretches over the top of the bin like a fitted bedsheet. Just add dirt, seedlings and water, and stand back for explosive growth. We'll see. It's on wheelies, too, in case I need to move it. On the far end, above, is a Siletz tomato, on the near side, a Stupice. Both are reputed to do well in the Willamette Valley. The latter looks a little peaked, though it is already bearing (a) fruit and might just be stressed by the rigors of early pregnancy.

I bought all five plants I've mentioned as seedlings from Territorial Seed Company, which has a fine reputation for breeding and selling varieties that do well in the Northwest. They were spendy ($5 and change each, once you factor in shipping); for the price, I was hoping they'd be larger. If they do well I'll hunt around at local nurseries and buy them in person next year.

I plunked a second Sun Gold, purchased at a neighborhood plant sale ($2 for a seedling already almost a foot tall), directly into the garden. We'll see how it does relative to the one in the big black container. A few feet to the east of that, I found room for another, smaller pot. This one (above) is a Black Krim, Russian in heritage and reputed to do well in our relatively short growing season.

A couple of weeks ago I started zucchini and yellow summer squash seeds (also from Territorial) inside, in the dressing-room garden window. They look vigorous and eager to get growin'. My plan is to colonize some of the bare spots in the front garden left vacant by my deceased euphorbia, kniphofia, ornamental grasses and the few not-hardy-enough phormiums that survived the snows of '08-'09 but succumbed to this past December's dry, windy arctic chill. Maybe I'll plant some squash among the irises on the west side of the house, which gets some afternoon sun. I'll have enough seedlings left, I'm sure, to plunk a few in the so-called veggie bed in my ever-more-challenging backyard.

Disquieted

Berry Botanic Garden is on the endangered list. I’d been wanting to go, and when a visiting friend asked about it, seized the opportunity. We went this morning and saw dozens of new-to-me plants, including the exquisite Agapetes serpens from the Himalayas (above) and a kiwi relative (below) called Actinidia kolomikta, which appeared to be suffering from a beguilingly lovely fungal blight, but is actually healthy and normal.

I’m nowhere near knowledgeable enough to qualify as a plant geek. You think I knew these names? Any civilized garden -- and Berry is certainly that -- like any civilized social gathering, offers name tags to its guests.

My friend and her husband are staying downtown, in the Park Blocks, and I asked her to drop me off there so I could check out the current exhibit at the Portland Art Museum. The show is called Disquieted, and it lives up to its name: skewed, often creepy, images involving the human body. This highly detailed and realistic sculpture of a boy, for instance, by Ron Mueck. For scale, the mirror behind him, which is part of the piece, is about 18” tall. It’s like some freakish taxidermy, and yet so realistic that you half expect him to turn his head and start talking. Deeply disturbing, yet I couldn’t turn away. It reminded me of that plastinated cadaver exhibit that toured a couple of years ago, only without the flaying.

The show was interesting, though off-balancing and ultimately kind of depressing. I knew I’d find a welcome counterpoint downstairs, in the permanent Asian collection. I spent a few minutes with Quanyin, strolled through the hall of Buddhas, and headed for the bus, quieted.

Reinhabiting

The glass shower door was installed on Tuesday. Take a good look; it’ll never be this clean again.

The double towel rack we ordered arrived yesterday and Jerry mounted that. He also did a neat job of encasing the cord for our electric toothbrush -- another small, why-didn’t-we-do-this-years-ago? adjustment.

Our towels are hanging, there’s a new rug on the floor. The skinny cabinet is loaded with our toiletries and sundries (there’s a word you don’t hear much anymore).

On the one hand it’s slightly depressing to clutter this pristine space with our funky old stuff; on the other, it’s fun to organize, shake things up, view objects in a different light.

Moving into a re-built environment involves a process of adjustment: Oops, the door opens that way now. Oh right, the mirror’s over here. Band-Aids are on the middle shelf of the upper cabinet. One must now place one’s front paws in the sink to get a drink of water.

When we completed our big Berkeley remodel, Stewart Brand came to the addition-warming party and asked us a lot of questions. He was writing a book called How Buildings Learn, and was interested in the adaptations that structures make, over time, to meet the needs of their inhabitants. At that point all I could tell him was that we’d most likely never close the pocket door on the walk-in closet and probably shouldn’t have spec’d it. What we didn’t know at the time was that the new flight of stairs would become magnificent loge seating at singthings, the magical musical gatherings that we would eventually host.

I don’t expect any profound social opportunities to unfold from this simple bathroom remodel. But we’re already starting to think about the next project. That’ll involve knocking down walls and dramatically altering spaces. Who knows what might happen then?

Fairy Condos, Hobbit Houses and Troll Sheds

We’re not the only ones involved in a construction project this spring. A developer named Emily just put up a condo complex for fairies on SE 36th Ave. It appears to be loaded with amenities. If you lived here, you’d be home by now.

Elsewhere in the ‘hood, a treehouse for hobbits appeared and, on the same lot, a funky troll shed sported a new coat of paint(s). This is infill housing I can live with.