a wild, high desert hare

may. 2006. jenilee's truck wheels crunching slowly over desert gravel. around the bend and through the sage brush, this magnificent creature appears. ridiculously enormous ears alive with our sound, eyes bulging.
sometimes, in new york city, it's nice and bizarre to remember that these creatures are right now hopping in the high desert. while snow falls on diamond street and garbage trucks clatter on their way.
and sometimes it's nice to remember that i started this blog simply to share an image here and there. 'shot'. spackleshot. sometimes i don't post for weeks feeling pressure to entertain you, to give you only meaningful words.
so instead. here. have a rabbit.

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.

the secret downside of a good deed: junk.

is it only my sickness that whenever i help anyone move, i end up coming home with bagfuls of junk? that stuff that guilt prevented to even regift is finally cast off, much to the relief of it's long suffering owner who is finally, through the pain of watching boxes of their belongings turn to mountains, emboldened enough to chuck it. or stuff that truly is great. it's just, you already have too much great stuff of your own.

all in all, after days of helping kathleen pack up her apartment, i was doing pretty well, being given wonderful and useful stuff like canola oil and sugar and taco shells. and then jade came across this monstrosity. apparently someone else does share my sickness.

and no, it's not even mug size. it's one of those weird tall mugs. and as for the extra inch of three dimensionality that the pig jumps from the body of the mug, i shake my head and have nothing to say. jade is mystified at my horror and keeps thrusting it in my face as though expecting me to coo and think it's cute. "it's a baby!"

of course, then i had to go home with three of these plates that my family will recognize as my grandma alice's classic everyday pattern...

i can't help it. i love them so.

just a tease

so the deal with me is that i have to lay down when i get tattooed. even if it's on my arm, because otherwise i will pass out. or, to be more lady-like, faint. i add the lady-like 'faint' in, to show my mother that despite the addition of a new kick-ass tattoo, i am still totally a lady. um, as much as i ever was....
a tough girl who must endure the not so tough insistance on bringing out the 'bed'.

you're not getting an unveiling yet because my tattoo isn't finished! but here is the boss and me, mugging like it is....
get back to me in a month and there will be more to see and hear...

let the birthday spoilage continue!

there is a unique and particular joy in sporting a layered mesh skirt that could only be described as stevie nix, that you dug out of a free pile of discarded 'art' in a sandy and abandoned hockey rink, with striped tights and boots, and knowing that tonight is the night that your boss, arguably the best tattoo artist you know of, will leave another mark on your arm.

thirty-five. really?

back in 1998 i went to vidal sassoon on 5th avenue and signed up to be a hair model. this was a lot less glamorous than it sounds. it didn't involve strolling down any catwalks, but importantly, it did involve getting a free haircut. i was a little bit nervous, but tried to be buddhist about it--lose my attachment to material things. it's just hair, right? it turns out my hairstylist student failed her test. she was so nervous and unsure that she took 3 and a half hours to give me a bob. but i have to say, up to that point, it was the best haircut of my life. even though i had to call in late to work, i strutted out onto fifth avenue shaking my silken bob like it was my personal catwalk.

so if that was the haircut i got when the students failed, what could possibly go wrong? i came back in 1999 for more. i was 23 years old. i was feeling edgy. i said short. really short. i was thinking chunky. raw. punk rock. yeah! but the catwalk delusion was over. when shown the mirror i couldn't even gasp. this haircut was so awfully boxy and boring that i couldn't even get worked up over it.

again, i went straight to work, but instead of oohs and ahs, i got puzzled looks and hesitation. wow. you look.....very.....mature. said the nice people. the men at work, ever the more honest, flat out told me i looked old. in the space of two days, the number 'thirty-five' was mentioned more than five times. two different people told me i looked like a thirty-five year old lesbian.

this haircut seemed to really have a unifying effect over peoples' opinions, as though everyone had discussed the bad haircut of kitty joe before dropping comments. the lesbian part didn't bother me. maybe edgy lesbian would have been cute. but THIRTY-FIVE?! as in 35?! how could a haircut age me a decade and a half? i was horrified, and forced to take drastic measures. well, not pull out the clippers kind of drastic. but the haircut was never seen again, so buried under clips, barrettes and headbands it became. and so i became twelve years old. and for the next five months it took to grow out, i could be heard mumbling around the house, ".....thirty-five!?"

so, um.....
tomorrow.....i'm turning thirty five.
and all i can think about is that haircut. and how old, how ancient, how lifetimes away thirty five seemed. and yes, it was a lifetime ago. and sure, i suppose i do feel a lot older, even in the frightening ways i imagined back then. but some part of me--perhaps denial, perhaps protest--quietly notices, that i sure haven't made much progress toward growing up, striped socks and all. and maybe i'm kind of happy about that.

a little ditty bout boots, tape and love.

somewhere between rochester and buffalo, the lower sole of my boot detached all the way back to the heel, leaving me limping and tripping over the railyard rocks. this did not provide me with a very smooth or incognito gait for trainhopping.

since our boxcar was detached from the freight in buffalo, we wandered out of the yard and over the freeway to investigate fixes. a roll of duct tape was purchased from the surprisingly inhabited wal mart behind the booming value city.


i was back in business--at least temporarily--and rocked the silver tape shoe all over cleveland.


and once i got home, my handy jade rigged up some glue and clamps, melting my heart. ah, the things that impress me.