Dealing with art & artists at the new print studio

Supreme Pasta Salad with olives, pepperoncini, mushrooms, tomatoes, feta, mozzarella, bell pepper. Water. Later, JJ made me a couple of chocolate graham cracker s'mores while we watched The Great Pumpkin.

Somewhat garbled.

I'm hanging out at this big house with several artists, which apparently include Claire and Elise. (cf Blonde Pie Mark's parent's sort of house) The lower floor or basement is converted to a printmaking studio, but is dimly lit and still has its carpet. It really looks more like an artistic teenager's space down there. The neighboring building, which apparently is owned by the same people as this place, is a sort of 2-story row house, which at one point was inhabited by friendly types, but now it's all headbangers & heshers. They are NOT going to be interested in buying any of our prints, in my opinion, but I'm forced (by Regina?) to try to sell to them anyhow. It goes nowhere.

Back at the house, I'm being ushered around by Archer, though she's more like Marnie from high school, in a long black dress and very pale. I find a piled up edition of these large prints, by Ray, I think. I take two and decide that they need to come with me. They are large, though, about 3 feet square, so I proceed to roll them up. I need to find some sort of paper to go around them, however, and I can't. They keep unrolling, as we wander around, and I keep clumsily rolling them back up. They are getting pretty handling dented.

Ray shows up, in full bike riding gear, all spandex and helmet and utilitarian BS. Some guy (Matt Tuttle, maybe?) heartily greets him and calls him Keno. Ray is chatty and friendly. We are all expressing some relief not to be working back at NG.

I'm a young Hogwarts student, and we discover the alien duckblind

Late night burrito sans chile after the Obama rally at Johnson Field. Followed by a beer and some Master Hunter.

I'm a newbie at a boys school. It's kind of like Hogwarts, I suppose. We're playing a game that is kind of like baseball. The woman who gave out uniforms said that I wouldn't fit into the normal uniform, and she gave me these big, baggy shorts and a different shirt than the other guys. It's pretty embarrassing. The other guys are a lot bigger and stronger looking than I am. My friend and I are definitely pipsqueaks. At my turn up at bat or whatever, though, I'm glad that I manage to make it to base, at least.

We break for innings, and we have to go change the color of our uniform shirts. We all go to the locker room. Kevin Thompson from elementary/mid school is there, on my team. He's one of the older, bigger guys. They're laughing and joking around. He chides me for my weird baggy shorts, while the rest of them have essentially boxer briefs instead. He jokes that their shorts are too small, and I look over and he's got a big erection in his shorts. He's threatening to bump me with it. (I'm not horrified, like he assumes I am, but I'm not particularly eroticized by the idea, either.) He does playfully rut against my shoulder a couple of times. I flatly ask him "Why do you have an erection?" to point out that he's the "gay" one in this situation. We all find that someone has been messing with our stuff, and our proper uniforms are largely missing. We head back out.

I'm in the outfield, which extends to a warm, yellow stone building façade with an arcade across the ground level. (An arched walkway, not a vid arcade.) Either me or my pipsqueak friend--I seem to be playing the part of both of us off an on--wanders under the arcade and suddenly I'm swept up by some magnetic force in the ceiling. It's not so strong that I can't push away and gently land again. I try it again. What in the world? Forget the game, what is going on with this? We call some of the other guys over. Harry Potter (himself) shows up with great tool in hand. He brings out a three-pronged garden fork. The magnetic force lifts him, and straightens out the tines of the fork. There is an intricate metal cap or dial, which is the real source of the power. The tines fit into the relief of the surface and he is able to turn it, unlocking the room above.

I think the ceiling opens, and we are able to get up inside this circular, secret room. We realize that aliens have been watching us from here. We decide we have to catch them. Pipsqueak friend and I are elected, as the ones who discovered it, to sleep in this place. We do. And I dream, in my dream. The aliens are in the room, they have the appearance of foam rubber. But they are biological. They are like bipedal frogs, almost. They have big masses of a green-black, salty caviar-like food that they are gnashing. On the floor, there is a little wooden open-topped box, with three or four compartments (cf the old divided screw box at the Art Museum on the framing table). There are peanuts and other little snacks in the compartments. My friend and I are eating these. Not certain if that is the best idea. We start to wonder if this is a dream we're having, or if this was the alien's plan all along. Are we in big trouble here? Harry Potter comes forcing his way up through the floor. Not bursting the materials, but more like it's a holograph and he emerges literally through it, headfirst. He's going to save us. We're all working on somehow getting that roe mess out of their mouths.

PD Rearick

DiGiorno spinach/mushroom pizza with home grown tomatoes and green chile on top, water, bowl of cereal.

[Simply put,] I run into PD Rearick, I think at the Los Poblanos store where he had his big sale. He's busy messing about with, indeed, a big mess of photography, rolling a big piece up like a poster [art herder's note: never ever ever roll up a photograph!]. I congratulate him on his architectural photograph from Detroit. It seems like maybe he's put on a little weight, and he's not dressed as smartly as I have always seen him dress, lo these many years. He's wearing a big, bulky tan coat, workpants, tan work boots. He's friendly as ever and greets me with cheer.

We can't possibly serve dinner to all these people

Stroganoff noodles, corn, baked potato, Sprite, an ice cream bar at Lodge (turned in my petition!), a bowl of cereal later after I got home.

I'm back working for NG again, but instead of a byzantine old meat packing building it's in a cavernous little old house with many rooms. There's a woman working there who looks like the mean one-armed mother from Boston Public, but she operates like Bubble from AbFab. He's pulled some tables out in a dining room, and instead of setting them up like hors d'oeurves and snacks, she's set them with place settings and pulled chairs around. As people start to show up, they think that we're serving a sit-down meal. And Bubble actually takes a step in confirming the misunderstanding, as she quickly plates up a little salad and drops it for each of them. I'm increasingly anxious, though-- we aren't serving a meal here, and we shouldn't have ever given signals that we were. Damn it. Now we're scurrying around the kitchen looking for dishes.

Bubble is scooping up some Adzuki beans into little parfait bowls. In a cupboard I find a strange pile of red and white pills, formed into a bowl shape. They only barely stick together, and I crush and crumble the whole mess in my hands. The tactile sensation is somewhat like crushing hunks of pomegranate seeds. I look back up into the cupboard and see a white sculpted polymer clay ring, formed like a series of foetuses, the whole thing about the diameter of e cereal bowl, and the pill bowl would fit down nicely into it. I realize then than this is one of Josh's sculptures, something from back in school, and I've just destroyed it. Damn it! But wait, oh my Lord, did Bubble get the pills mixed up into the beans? Has she been serving bowls of pills? I'm not certain.

In any case, people are starting to lose interest in our meal, as we obviously are hard pressed to serve them anything. I'm still scrambling around. R comes breezing through and is useless, only throws a further wrench into the works. I finally go bursting back into the dining room with armloads of plates and bowls, only to find that everyone has given up and abandoned the dinner tables. Sigh.

[This is obviously coming from a few different directions. The fear of not being able to feed a crowd is springing from me putting myself in Adam's place back at Lodge, considering how I would fare as JW, if I had to pull together meals. The crushed artwork issue references when I broke Josh's Child of the Earth figure (made of white Sculpey, just like the foetus ring), which is on the brain because of Kris Mill's Jerusalem Cricket (another name for a CotE) show at Harwood. That I'm stuck back at the gallery probably stems from recent professional frustrations with the OPS/IAS, and the lack of dishes, which equates to a lack of tools to achieve what suddenly I am expected to do, also ties in there...]