oh, so many things to wonder.

this image greeting me this morning brought up oh so many questions, foremost being, 'are deer antlers recyclable?'.

runners up: how the hell did deer antlers end up in my recycling can?, was there a deer on diamond street, shot from an apartment window? did one of the bearded hipsters so plentiful in williamsburg decide to wander over and do more than look the part, but take up hunting? does the weekly snow also come with reindeers?! oh, and since we're in greenpoint, was this deer polish?

oh, so many things to wonder.

they say good things come in three, don't they?

photo by kim and tristan's incredible and multi-talented doula

today my dear friend kim turns 33. so i guess it's an appropriate time to announce belatedly, that holy crap! kim now has 3 babies! which is to say, welcome loretta adeline.

she came at thanksgiving time, which makes her already seven weeks old. and in case you're wondering, yes, it's driving me crazy that i haven't been formally introduced.

big sister ginger

big sister rose, practicing her baby talk. loretta, not impressed.

i suppose this is also an appropriate time to share images from kim's baby shower, which jade and i were lucky enough to swoop into town for a couple of days to attend...

click here to see the full flickr set.

iphone photo of the day

catching these spontaneous moments was one of my favorite things about owning an iphone. but alas, it seems i'm simply not an adult enough to keep one alive (but hey-i've kept a cat alive for 12 years! knock on wood, i can't be that bad!).

my first iphone seemed to be so tough that after dropping it at least 80 times from my overall chest pocket while bending over at work, to no consequence, i became nonchalant. then one day i didn't even pick it up after dropping it absent-mindedly. instead, i stepped on it. one down.

so after over a year of hand wringing and withdrawl, i bought another one. used.
after three blissful months, it just mysteriously stopped working in the middle of hopping trains to cleveland. now don't laugh. this may sound irresponsible, but understand that this time i was so careful! I had it packed away in my backpack in a plastic ziploc bag and didn't even turn it on! but the genius at the apple store announced it dead on arrival due to water damage, data not even salvageable.

the conclusion to be drawn is that clearly, i'm not meant to have an iphone. so although my work takes me between two studios, and art gallery, a tattoo shop and all up and down the new york and beyond's waterfront, i pack this little green flip phone--a years old cast off hand-me-down from the williamsons. sometimes it just stops charging, but eventually it rallies. these days it's become a conversation piece. it seems there are two kinds of phone people use: the $20 disposable drug dealer phones or the iphone/blackberry/android smartphone. when i pull out my motorola pebl, it is met with laughter and wonder. as though instead of pulling out an ipod on the subway, i've pulled out an 8-track machine.

but i'm not afraid to break it, and hence, it survives.
this, by the way, is how i feel about expensive jewelry. terrified. gimme rhinestones any day and no thanks to diamonds.

being on the cutting edge of the trend, not so fun in this case

new york city is being overtaken by bedbugs. we all know this. in fact, the entire country seems to be, with 3 cities in ohio ranking in the top 10 for per capita infestations. you can't walk a half a block without having to carefully maneuver around abandoned mattresses speckled with telltale flecks of sleeping victims blood. can't step on the subway without having to see bedbugs in advertisements blown up to the size of your head. bedbugs are the new ever-present monsters of the city now. the new roaches. the new muggers.
everyone knows multiple people who have them. everyone is in fear. but it's now a group problem that is met with empathetic sympathy.

this wasn't the case four years ago when i had one of the worst infestations i've heard of. it was august, and i was wearing long sleeve shirts in an attempt to cover up my nasty devoured arms. bite on the eyelid? just leave the sunglasses on all day! bedbugs were something kept very secret. no one wanted to know you had them. and no one wanted to know you if you had them. oh, and have them i did. the elderly lady who lived downstairs worked as a maid at a 5-star that had to close down five floors for bedbug extermination. it seems the infested carpets and furniture were just too tempting to pass up, and she decided she'd hoard them in our basement. it took over TEN visits from the exterminators, complete decimation of any semblance of normalcy in my apartment and the development of full post-traumatic stress disorder before i learned of this key fact. she's lucky our building didn't turn into a riot mob and come to her in the middle of the night with pitchforks and torches. we probably would have, if we hadn't been so damn tired. in a turn of events baffling and SO unfair, her apartment was one of only two in the building that was not infested. you can read my delirious reports here and here.

but all of this preamble to merely report a silly memory: during our many exhaustive exterminations, i quickly entered the phone number of the extermination company into my phone as 'BEDBUGS'. seemed simple, straightforward. first thing that popped into my head. but sometimes when my phone would ring, sleep deprived and on edge as i was, it would be very startling to look on my cell display and see the words BEDBUGS CALLING. you can run. but you can't hide. they're even calling on the damn phone!

you can do anything but lay off of my blue suede shoes.

when my dad was young he pretended to hate elvis. pshaw, he scoffed. what's the big fuss about? later, he admitted to me that he'd just been jealous because the girls were so crazy for elvis. in flipping through my dad's old high school yearbooks, it seems that the girls were pretty crazy for him too, and the style he rocked was most definitely along the king's lines. and i don't mean white rhinestone-studded jumpsuit elvis, but the slick, young greaser, the elvis in blue jeans.

by the time i was a little girl, my dad had gotten over the stigma of liking elvis and no longer hid his full blown admiration of and devotion to the king. Rather, my dad embraced elvis as a hero, as someone who could animate his serious self to dancing in the car, pounding the dashboard as he drove and poking me with a big smile. in this way, i cannot think of elvis without thinking of my dad. fondly.

this morning i walked into pop's popular clothing, looking for some work boots. early saturday morning. bleak january sidewalks covered with a thin layer of treacherous ice and most of the roll down gates still locked down tight. the owner of the disorganized warehouse of a store turned elvis on the stereo and announced "the king would have been 76 years old today!" he looked an awful lot like my dad. and it made me smile.

31 march 2009

it's been a while since i've posted any of these images from my '98 pictures of 98 people' series. since i'm so busy/uninspired over here, seems like a good time to continuing sharing them.

happy new year hoppin' john!

and again, i'm eight years old!

snow! out the kitchen window.

i'm pretty sure i take and post this identical photo here every time we get a big snow. but it just never ceases to awe me. it started snowing yesterday morning when i was out running errands. it didn't stop all day and all night. then the crazy snow thunder and lightning came for extra dramatic effect. really, lightning and snow--a strangely beautiful combination.

snow! out the bedroom window.

fa-la-la-la-la....is that right?

ornament by the incredible nikki mc ferren

so maybe i'm a thirty-five year old child who gets as excited about christmas as a second-grader hopped up on hot chocolate. so maybe i can't help but make gingerbread today, even though kim and kiyomi are 3000 miles away, just because.

and while this holiday zeal is absolutely sincere, apparently i have my limits.

the most festive thing i've done this christmas time was to stumble into a swingin' country christmas singalong. yes. a swingin' country christmas singalong. new york is great for that. if you do your research, you could find an event as awesomely random as this, 365 days a year. in this case, sarah dragged me out of my working hovel and forced me into the ribbon lined, pews of jalopy--a cafe style performance space in red hook. being early december, i hadn't yet been hit with the holiday spirit stick--or cane, i suppose, in this case. but the sweetback sisters said 'bring it on!' and i was game. i was convinced. it was great.

except it was really hard for me. already i'm someone who hates crowd participation. i am eternally suspicious of the first few rows of any auditorium and really don't want to sit there, lest i be pulled up on stage and hypnotized into making out with an elvis impersonator or have to endure some clever thespian's spontaneous assault. or be asked to wear a burger king crown and slow dance while a boy you have a crush on sings fools rush in. (um, that last one actually happened). no thank you. i even really hate clapping along with a song just because everyone else is doing it. i will sit there with a bad attitude, arms folded, while everyone claps off-beat grinning. i hate it in the style that the grinch hated christmas. yes, like someone who's shoes are too tight.

but a sing-along shouldn't be a problem, right? i mean, they put the words in a booklet and everyone's doing it, not just the front row? and i love christmas, right? this should be totally awesome. but for that very same reason that i overzealously love christmas, it was impossible to feel right. and that is that i was raised under the influence of the jehovah's witnesses. i didn't sing christmas carols at church or at school. i wasn't allowed. in fact, when they sang christmas carols or made pipe cleaner santas or ate snowman cookies, i was escorted out of the classroom and generally given the task of counting the rocks on the elementary school wall. i could still hear the singing, but it was muffled and forbidden. an evil kind of satan thing. and by the way, did you ever notice how you could just scramble the letters of santa to get satan? mmhmm. i didn't think you did.

so being asked to sing "who comes around on a beard that's white" (wait, what's the lyric?), though a delightful thought, feels like looking at a songbook page that says, "shit fuck piss damn". these are words that as an adult, i don't mind saying (sorry, dad!), but nonetheless hold the stigma of trouble. of evil. singing them out loud feels weird. and that didn't change, even after 12 choruses of the 12th day of christmas.

and so it was. swayback sisters and band dressed in festive garb, artificially flocked trees glistening with electricity, jingle bells, and mouthful after mouthful of profanity. it was glorious. and it made me squirm.

my name is kitty joe sainte-marie, and i'm a recovering jehovah's witness.

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.