o pioneers.

it's tuesday and i'm back in new york city. winter has settled definitively into the space that was occupied last week by an unusually mild autumn. remembering the disgustingly hot summer and how it threatened to kill my love for this city, i don't complain. yet still i yearn to be back upstate, off the grid, in the big country house where jade and i spent thanksgiving week.


the first four days we spent alone, performing basic improvements to the house as a trade for the opportunity to be there, and preparing jade's sculptures for casting. we worked hard and fell into bed tired, but it was lovely. there were fires in the wood stove, three home-cooked meals a day and most importantly a huge expanse of space and quiet. romantic. festive. beautiful.



jade, sculpting.

we sat with our hands in cold buckets of alginate that turned to jello. creepy fun!




the day before thanksgiving, friends began to join us. to help out. to hang out. hardly any of them knew each other, but all became friends through the process. so awesome.

dwain.

nora.

i found myself fascinated to be immersed for an extended period of time in the barren east coast winter landscape. of course i've seen the leaf-less trees of the city for a decade and a half and have traveled outside of the city during wintertime. but i found it a totally foreign feeling to be so surrounded by entire mountainside and valleys of bony trees. that, combined with the novelty of being so far into the country, with the only neighborly interaction in a week being a wave from an orange-clad atv riding hunter from a field away, made me feel like i was in a time warp. an east coast time warp. ah, such are the delusions of a city girl. i felt like a pioneer, or like laura linney playing abagail adams, laboring away on my farm while revolutionary soldiers could have tromped through the hills behind.


david, allison, jade and matt.


and behold. aluminum was heated furiously hot and poured into molds.

xavier.



this was an incredibly laborious process that required knowledge, physical strength, extreme patience and keeping your cool.

sexy.
sexy!


david and matt discovered they were born on the very same day of the very same year.


terrified of all things related to fire, i can't claim to have been directly helpful to this process. i had to give peripheral support via running countless pots of boiling water out to bathe the propane tank, cooking big meals and keeping the fire going in the kitchen for the warming of numb limbs.


but what an incredible process to witness!


and how splendid to see jade's work cast in metal.

i have a bazillion and one more photographs, which i will upload to flickr in the coming week. in the meantime, extreme thanksgiving to dara and alberto: we're ready to move in!

how life really is...

how often does conversation focus solely on the exact action occurring? in life, not so much, but in video, generally. here, a bizarre yet natural juxtaposition of setting up for a metal pour and gossip about television, death and fetish. a kitchen conversation captured while watching matt and david set up for metal pouring. hot dogs, hot metal, fetish, work and death.

how life really is... from kitty joe ste-marie on Vimeo.

"it's about to get real old new york in here"

for two years the boss has been predicting the return to the new york of the 70's, the new york of everyone's fears. the gritty, graffitti-covered subway car new york. the pickpocket, everyone down on their luck new york. the romantic, crumbling new york. not the new development new york.
yesterday it felt that way to me as i walked to meet jade at his studio. glancing down a side street, my eye was caught by a flame. and there, just as i had walked into a movie set (which, by the way, is a common occurance in new york and especially brooklyn) men stood huddled around a garbage can, fire leaping upward, warming their hands. but there was no camera crew, no tent of craft services food to walk through, no mega cords and pissy pa's to trip over. just a fire in a can at twilight.

two hours later, as a group of my friends climbed the subway stairs to fourteenth street, a man and a woman screamed at each other, threatening to call the cops and hurling insults. as we waded through the melee, half cringing for fear of catching a stray punch, the screaming woman wrapped her hands around a steel crossbeam that supported a large scaffold. she twisted it mightily as the joint weakened and we scurried more quickly by. she meant business. jade's friend muttered as we chuckled with near fiendish delight, "it's about to get real old new york in here."

ah...maui.

stole this snapshot from my mom. i'm on such vacation i didn't even bring a camera. i know. how do you not bring a camera when you go to paradise? two reasons: carry-on only, and do you know how much vacation time i spend with my obsessive taking five million photos of every natural feature in sight?
now, back to the sunset.