Hither and Thither #33

A short one this week. I wasn’t at my desk a lot this week, due to the supreme pleasure of showing my visiting bestie around Seattle, which means my RSS reader is largely unread. I spied this dude on the way to dance class a few days ago. I hope he stays forever. I want there to be a plaque and an artist’s statement. Reading this left me aching to sit at my desk with paper, scissors, and about a million hours to spare. (Although I realize a laser cutter would be the more useful tool.) 12th Avenue, Capitol Hill. Pointed. Apt.

Since my friend went home yesterday, I’ve been very domestic, which means lots of podcasts. I’ve had quite the backlog of Podcastle, which means two things:

I do not have enough fantasy fiction in my life.
I can remedy that beautifully and immediately.

So, in the past few days, I’ve enjoyed listening to:

Fine soundtracks for laundry, dishes, and cooking.

And I will leave you with just one more:

Having a friend in town is a great motivator to check out things you’ve managed to miss so far, and so it was with the two of us and Ines Pattiserie. I needed coffee, and she wanted a cookie, and we wound up with this raspberry cake, multiple cookies, a croissant, a small anise meringue, and an additional almond croissant bagged to be eaten later. (I ate it as part of a breakfast thali the next day with blueberries, cut pears, and fried eggs.) The proprietor is soft-spoken, intense, and very keen for you to try new things. She kept heaping extra goodies on the plate, and we ate until we had only the mildest of regrets. Also, the espresso was some of the best I’ve had in some time.

It is very beautifully and very meticulously put together. And I will wear stretchy pants next time.

People Who Are Not Having a Good Time at Bruges’ Memling Museum

It’s easy to go to Europe and get total Beautiful Antiquities fatigue. Between the towns and cities full of centuries-old churches, museums stocked with the riches that come with living in an old country, and the availability of these things to willing American tourists, you can become a particular kind of jaded. Truth: I realized on this trip that I actually am not all that interested in visiting old churches. They are beautiful, yes. And if there’s a certain local mythology going on, as there was in both Bruges and Brussels (more on that later), you learn about another aspect of the place you’re staying more viscerally than you could otherwise. But when I see ornate churches, lavished with riches and made with decades and centuries of labor from the faithful, I only see ruined lives and bent souls, both in the past and now. All the carved wood, stunning sculpture, and ancient gilding in the world can’t get me past that.

But the Memling Museum… that is a different matter.

The Memling Museum collects art, history, and medical paraphernalia from across the 800-year history of this hospital/nunnery/cradle of fine Flemish art.

I promise this makes sense.

Hans Memling was an adopted citizen of Bruges, and he created stunning commissions for, among others, the curiously flourishing nuns and priests of Sint-Janshospitaal.* So the museum collects some of Memling’s works, some of the tools used for palliative care of pilgrims who appeared in Bruges feeling poorly, and other artifacts from the hospital’s long history.

I was enthralled.

You should go, if you get the chance. But in case you don’t, here’s a thematic tour. I give you: a selection of people who are having a bad time in art in the Memling Museum.

Detail from Portrait of Francois de Wulf, anonymous, 18^th century. The rest of this painting depicts a man who would like you to know he is quite skilled and prestigious, looking at us to reassure us of this and paying not nearly enough attention to prodding this child in the eyeball. Sorry, child. It wasn’t easy being a pilgrim in the 1700s. We get pairs of things for a reason, I guess.

Opthalmodouleia, das ist Augendienst, Georg Bartisch, 1535-1607. This is a page from a book meant to instruct you of something. Mainly, it instructed me that I should take a moment to be glad that I was born when I was. But I’m always glad of that.

Detail from The Anatomy Lesson, Anonymous, Bruges, 1679. Surrounding this man: a bunch of other men who look disinterested as only Flemish paintings of aristocrats can make a person look.

Intermission: GIANT FREAKING KIDNEY STONES, OH MY GOD. Not included: an explanation of the long, wonderful lives the people who produced these went onto live.

Hans Memling’s Virgin Nursing the Christ Child. This is one of the centerpieces of the museum, and for good reason. I draw. I make art. But I’ve never worked in oils, and the colors they can produce still stun me. I stood in front of this for a good minute, drinking it in.

But I have an inescapable truth for you.

Neckboob.

And that is why Our Lady here is included in this roundup.

Detail from Magi, the Circumcision, and the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Anonymous, Flanders, 16^th century. I like this painting because our focus here has the distinct look of someone going, “Uh, hey, can we have a word? There’s more going on here than I signed up for.”

Detail from The Good Samaritan, Anonymous, Southern Netherlands, 16^th century. At least we know this fellow has better things waiting for him on the other side. Of the story, not the great rift between the living and the dead. That too, I suppose, considering the theme of the museum.

And, finally, St. John Altarpiece, Memling, around 1479.

Ah, you hate to see that.

We didn’t make it to the Groeninge Museum (though I very much enjoyed reciting Rick Steves’ transcribed versions of how to properly pronounce said museum’s name), but we made the right choice. The Memling Museum, with its wonderful collision of ghastly history, transcendent beauty, and peculiar local history, was one of the highlights of the whole London-Brussels-Bruges trip for me. I was a bit surly on my day in Bruges, but the Memling Museum made all the tourist-dodging and other bits of sourness utterly worth it.

Though having cause to dash across a museum, whisper neckboob to someone you love, and dash back away… well, that is a balm for the spirits too.

*That is: in which I learn that not all people who dedicated their lives to Christianity took a vow of poverty! Because wow, those were some hefty commissions. My favorites: triptychs where the central panel depicts a pivotal moment of Christian mythology… and the two outer wings contain portraits of the priests, nuns, and monks who commissioned the works, staidly looking on as St. John is beheaded or someone important gets circumcised or something of that nature. And, in case you didn’t catch the likeness, many had their names painted above their depictions. I learned many things that day.

Hither and Thither #32

I arrived to the Greater England Area just a few hours too late to go see this. I might’ve taken a train to Liverpool just for this. I might have.

There are a lot of ways to be at odds with how your brain sees your body and how your body actually is. This was a new one to me.

I see this message more often lately (though maybe still not often enough), and oh, it makes my heart soar. For a YA version (though still pretty effective), see the Ruby Oliver books.

All along, I’d been told cats speak French. Apparently not. Though I will say my own were nowhere to be seen when this stuff was erupting from my computer.

Your regular installment of Andrew W.K. makes you cry.

It is possible to have absurd amounts of money and also a little sense. I wish there was more of this.

My friend!

You don’t drool enough. No, seriously, get on that.

If I walked into a New York subway car and saw this, I might swoon from the wonderfulness.

I love when other people create roundups of my city. Eff that Storyville business, though.

We are better at valuing things if we have lacked them.

And, finally, a rad roundup about drawing the female body by women who have drawn their own bodies.

On London

No one knows which side of the stairs to walk on. Not ever. Not even with the friendly KEEP LEFT signs at the top and bottom of each flight of stairs in the Tube. Not while entering and exiting buildings either. No one, ever.

It must take a particular kind of fortitude to deal with the influx of confused foreigners, if you are a person who lives in London. All you want to do is go into a museum. All you want to do is walk up a flight of stairs from your subway ride without dealing with an obstacle course of would-be shoulder-checks.

No one knows. I never figured it out. I tried to do as the signs said, as the traffic would indicate, but all I ever did was dodge, a leaf on the wind.

I Had My Boobs Scrubbed by a Professional

Here’s a thing I forget about Manhattan.

Everyone is so slammed for space that the markers of luxury in most other parts of the country – palatial lobbies, building facades made just so, empty nooks left unfilled just so you understand the sheer wealth going on here – well, they’re not an option. The language of luxury reads differently in New York.

Which is why this sign, which would read as a kind of chintzy place of dubious quality in Seattle…

…is actually a really lovely, swanky spa.

Alas, this is where the pictures end. Cameras aren’t welcome in closed spaces where women are padding around swaddled in towels and bathrobes.

My sister from another mister and I have a tradition of taking advantage of couples deals at spas. We’ve done it in Sonoma, Arizona, and Renton, and now: Manhattan. And that is how I found myself kinda naked, semi-naked, and then pretty nearly close to naked on a plastic-covered table a mere few feet from a friend I’ve known for, at this point, slightly more than half my life.

I’ve been curious about Korean scrubs for a while, largely via the Seattle-obligatory thoughts of going to Olympus on my birthday. And my friend is my girly ambassador.* These two facts came together to find us, gently speckled with Manhattan dirt, wandering into a spa and wrapping ourselves in those strange towels with the elastic and velcro that fastens right above your boobs.

Oh, also: disposable underwear.

After we were swathed in towels and shod in too-big shower-style sandals, we sat awkwardly by a glassed-in manicure room, sipping cucumber water and sweating gently beneath our poly-blend towel dresses. Busy spas – the kind I like, anyway, when I go in for that kind of thing – have a kind of factory feeling. One person checks you in, one person hands you your garb, one person points you toward the water bar, and then another person fetches you with a gentle mispronouncing of your name for the actual reason you’re there. There’s something comforting about being just another body to a professional. When a spa swaths that central reality in too many layers of new age music, polished floors, and whispering attendants, I feel uneasy.

The stairs, bordered with strips of black sandpaper, were steep and curved in a quick u-shape, hard to navigate when you’re a little tall, a shade ungainly, and wearing sandals that are approximately seven sizes too big for you. Even so, we were quickly ushered into a large, tiled room that reminded me of the kind of communal shower experiences I never had in high school.** One shower curtain hung from the ceiling, obscuring the view from the door. The rest was open, all tiled walls, ceiling, and floor. And two water-resistant looking tables.

Have you ever experienced the boob towel? It appears in many guises. If you have ab work done by a massage therapist and you’re a woman, you’ve experienced the boob towel. A medium-sized bath towel is folded lengthwise into thirds and then placed gently, euphemistically over the most central part of your breasts so that everyone involved can act like you’re not actually topless. These common fictions unite us.

They’re pulled apart fairly quickly, however, when the woman scrubbing you moves it up and down before finally giving it up and moving it away entirely.

Here’s something I learned that day: all of you needs to be exfoliated. ALL OF YOU. I thought that this kind of thing would focus on the legs and arms, and maybe the back and other parts of us we can’t reach so well. No no. Here are some surprise areas I had thoroughly buffed that day:

My ankles
My armpits
That groiny area my friend describes as the bikini line
The less intimate areas of my ass
Every part of my boobs that doesn’t fall into the nipple provinces

And THOROUGH. At one point, I decided to count how many times my scrubber went over certain parts. She was a thorough woman, and I honestly lost count. Eight times? Twelve? I don’t know. Apparently I had an exoskeleton when I walked in there. I didn’t when I left.

I get massages on the regular, but I occasionally feel awkward about spa-like activities with an element of servitude to them. Pedicures, for instance – I feel awkward having another person sit at my feet. But this woman’s hands were so strong and sure that there was no question of who was in charge.

Spa technician: 1

Boobs: 0

And my faith in my own security in my body: assured. Because if you’re not 100 percent awesome with that, you will find out somewhere between when you climb nearly naked onto a plastic table and when the technician places a towel over your eyes and starts the surprisingly long process of exfoliating your jugs.

*Girly ambassador duties: helping your neglectful friend go bra shopping, introducing your curious friend to the wonders of Sephora, and endlessly helping your confused friend parse out relationships.

**I skipped gym. I’m still relieved.

Hither and Thither #31

I wound up back in San Francisco this weekend. When my friends and I returned from a Muir Woods and wine tour, we collapsed into a mediocre restaurant that I realized only too late tacked on a 4 percent protest charge about having to provide healthcare for its employees. It was too late to ditch. Sigh.

I did get to see this person from the window, though. Seattle doesn’t really have living statues and other beyond-human busking oddities. It makes for an easier walk, but a less magical existence.

Related: wine tours are excellent for responsible people who have dreams of being winos on their vacations. High marks.

Take a couple minutes and let Andrew W.K. make you cry. It’s worth it. Related: what happens to your social media when you die.

My inclination is more slow travel than mad dashes these days, but these maps laying out five-hour forays into a variety of cities are a great start when considering what to see in different places. I think they’re either a little optimistic on the travel time or a little pessimistic on the attention span, but that’s ok. Hand-drawn maps!

I do love miniature versions of things. For instance: Miniature World in Victoria, Mini-Europe in Brussels (which I will see soon), and the tiny reproductions of California missions in the California Mission Museum at Cline Cellars in Sonoma (which I tipsily shambled through this weekend). So how charmed was I to find this tiny, shakeable bridge on the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge? Extremely charmed. How much more did I shake it than is becoming for someone in her early 30s? Oh, a good sight more.

But I am also a person who went to an indoor trampoline park this weekend and merrily bounced for an hour alongside people a third my age. Or younger. There’s no accounting for me.

When I was very young, my mom presented me with dog tags embossed with her and my dad’s names and childhood addresses. I have always loved ephemera, so I adored these immediately – the texture, the sound they made clanking against each other, the idea of these elements of their lives before each other clanking together now on the same ball chain.

Then I thought about it and asked my mom where they came from. Neither of my parents were ever in the military; military makes dog tags; where did kids get dog tags?

That’s when I learned about the Cuban missile crisis and what threats became part of daily life for a weird period of my parents’ very middle Midwest childhoods.

I still liked the dog tags (see: “I have always loved ephemera”), but I appreciated that I got to wear them without the gravity that had once been attached to them.

99% Invisible (yes!) recently explored the fallout shelter economy and other weirdnesses that sprung up during this surreal part of American history.

Me? I share my mom’s opinion on this. No bunkers, no cement shelters buried in the earth. If I feel the end is coming, I’ll walk out on the street, arms outstretched, content to share the earth’s fate.

Hither and Thither #30

A beautifully decorated bike spotted near Seattle Center

Sweet ride in front of the Gates Foundation on 5th Avenue.

Cats can inspire you to do strange things. And not just via the toxoplasmosis.

I’m jazzed someone’s thought to do this. I realized some months ago that I’ve lived in Capitol Hill long enough that some of the older layers of businesses and buildings are fading in memory. What did that storefront used to be? How many things have been on that corner in the years I’ve been walking by? I am a watcher of things, and yet still, some parts of the past fade. It’s a strange benefit of Street View that you can layer the past and present like this.

Speaking of lost city culture, KUOW just posted a great roundup of parts of Capitol Hill that haven’t shifted: the communes. As a lover of both alternative means of community and living and as a person who considers The Golden Girls to be equal parts comedy and aspiration, I love every bit of this. (For another view of San Francisco’s changing face, look at this wonderfully deep dive into the data yielded from AirBnB.)

On conventions spoken and unspoken; on the elements of living and being that rise up unchallenged when we don’t allow outsiders to examine and respond. Continue reading →

Hither and Thither #29

When I get deep, deep into a necessary or unavoidable timesuck (school, depression), I daydream of creating like at no other time of my life. The key, and the thing I’m working on in my life right this minute, is carrying that frantic “IF ONLY I COULD, I WOULD WRITE A NOVEL AND CONSTRUCT DIORAMAS AND TRAVEL THE WORLD AND MAKE MY OWN INTERNET MOVIES, OH BOY OH BOY” energy over into non-frantic life.

I thought a lot about papercraft this last go-round. My first post-school task is to make my apartment feel livable, alive, and welcoming again. After that: oh, we are MAKING SHIT.

Which is to say, I love this so much and want to try it myself soon.

These portraits are so affectionate and so beautiful.

My friend Amy’s fine eye for the visual, deep love of children’s books, and wide-open curiosity about the world makes all of her travel-related blogging a joy to experience, but I especially loved this roundup of children’s books from her recent travels. I hope she brought an expanding suitcase… And here are her stupendous (STUPENDOUS) drawings from life. I got jealous in the best way.

I know where I am sending every single postcard and other piece of correspondence I might need to mail next time I’m in Paris.

In our data-driven world, everything has a strategy. EVERYTHING.

Making the total count of known books bound in human skin in the greater Boston area… four. FOR NOW.

No clever thing or sincere thing or anything I could say could top the existing title of this piece.

COVET.

An incredibly candid, giving, and useful look at the long-term creative process and how you can fuck it up with the best of intentions.

Today, Captain Awkward’s column extolled the perils of baby elephant pictures. While I can get on quite an internet tangent of cat pictures and otters and street art, this is my true risk. If there were days upon days of this kind of thing, you all might never hear from me again.

I have thought of doing this and didn’t, and I am grateful someone did.

As for podcasts… oh god, just go listen to 99 Percent Invisible, and I’ll catch you back here in a couple of days.

I’ve had this draft sitting and waiting for so long now. I can’t tell you how good it felt to go back, flesh it out, and get ready to go again. Like doing a forward fold after standing on cement at a concert for two hours, like using a washcloth to scrub inside your ear, like water when you woke up hungover. Hello. Let’s do this.

Hello.

I am writing to you from the other side.

For the last nine months, I’ve been working on a User-Centered Design certificate from the University of Washington. I have finished it.

If you looked at the calendar of posts on this blog, you would be able to precisely chart when my breaks were.

I have pictures on my camera’s SD card that date back to March.

Once upon a time, I emptied that card every day. Dutifully. Joyfully.

I have missed writing here, but some things have to slide when you’re throwing all your energy in one direction. In my case, this included dishes, exercise, creative writing, this blog, and about half my social life.

I am looking forward to the summer.

At work in late December, we gathered in the middle of the office for a celebratory toast. We were asked what our resolutions were.* I said that I didn’t have resolutions per se, but that I had a goal to go to three countries this year.

“Canada, Mexico, and where?” one coworker joked.

“No,” I said. “Three new countries.”

So far this year, I’ve seen Iceland, so I’m a third of the way toward a very good goal. As my autumnal plan to go to Japan has moved to next March, I’m left with two new slots to fill. I’ve spent a week in Mexico, but I think I would count Mexico City as part of the three-country list because it’s so different from the experience I had. So, beyond that… Germany? Italy? Somewhere in South America? Will this be my year to touch a tentative toe to Antarctica?**

I’m still working it out. But I’m thrilled that my middle-enough-class income and hoarding of credit card-generated airline points give me the privilege to be able to consider these things. Most of the world is open to me, and considering what parts of it I want to go to is, at the moment, almost as delicious as the going will be.

In the meantime, though, I’m just excited to have time to write again. I want to tell you about New York – my favorite trip there yet. I want to give you a snapshot of what I did for Easter. I want to show you the ducklings in the big fountain at UW and their ramp***, and graffiti I’ve liked, and what it’s like to ride in a pod of Minis around Whidbey Island. I went to the studio of the artist who made the Rachel piggy bank at Pike Market (and a bunch of other great pieces). I’ve gone clamming and seen spring flowers come and go and really had a very fine time. However, considering class and work and my continued need to do laundry and buy food now and then, I’ve only had time to go to these things… but not to write about them.

We’re at the end of that. Graphomaniac posting recommencing in three… two… one…

*My official resolution, so far as I make one, is always to floss. I’ve been resolving that for several years now. I highly recommend it: it’s easy, cheap, almost immediately beneficial, and you get good grades at the dentist. Think about it.

**No.

***THEY HAVE A RAMP.

Measures of Time in Fremont

In early November, I will have lived in Seattle for ten years.

My first full-time job was in Fremont. I was a mediocre-to-lousy office manager. I tried hard. Just not in an area where my considerable efforts can really do much good.

When I walked this part of the Burke Gilman every day, the dinosaurs only had ivy on their ankles. Leafy legwarmers. This is the only naked part left.

This is what ten years of ivy looks like.

Human growth and change… well, that’s a little harder to measure.

A Brooklyn Blog that Sometimes Travels

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