what's your favorite animal?

penguin! no, unicorn!

et voila... penguicorn, by darya farhoodi

art to talk about

i've been seeing Wangechi Mutu's work around in magazines. It's so sumptuous. Her collagey things are elegant and grotesque, beautiful and frightening. I'm not going to bring up the culture and gender themes in her work; right now I just like to look at them. Yummy.

here's an image from the Saatchi Gallery:

a blog about a blog

One of my photos was used as an illustration for a blog entry on this website: See Also... A library weblog, by Steve Lawson

Here's the closing line:
But if we want to want to show them the richness of the complicated, multifaceted, multi-format environment that is the modern day academic library, I can’t think of a worse way to teach that than with newspaper obituaries.



The funny thing about this is that I took that photo while working for the Oregon Newspaper Project at the University of Oregon. We microfilmed over one hundred current titles and old issues of the Oregonian.

That microfilm ball was a long time in the making. My boss, a film aficionado and amazing photographer, was always the first to defend microfilm. "It has a shelf life of 800 years! And what if all the computers crash?!" She is actually infinitely more eloquent than my paraphrase. Afterall, she's the person who taught me the word "maven." And in context.

Now I work in a small art-based academic library and we are always looking for new and exciting ways to promote information literacy. I agree with Mr. Lawson in that forcing people to find print sources of death notices is not the way to do this. The last time a student asked after print obituaries, it was for an art project.

neatoland

this is neat.

Portland Art Open

artists all over town open their homes, studios, etc to the public for one weekend. my friend meghan and her roomie are showing art in their apartment. anyone want to join me for a perusal?

here's one of meg's works:

The Chosen One

Mia curated an alphabet show here in the library and I got "B."



(Concept by Sean Graf. Art, 16 year-old me.)

Aaaah, the cuteness!

Some more kid art from the walls of PNCA.



I love the kitties spooning.

This next one is hilarious. I think Josh did a self-portrait because right next to this one was a self-portrait by his sister and in it she's crying. So funny.

The presence of sketch presents!

Someone taped this drawing to my computer at work. I love it:



What a nice kittydogfox!


(Addendum: I was showing one of the students how to access the Student Artwork Archives and she said, "Hey, that's my drawing!" Turns out that someone found it in the library and put it on my monitor. Thank you Kah Min Lee for letting my keep your cute drawing!)

And then Meghan did this drawing and gave it to me implying that I called HER a loser. Also, once when her mom came to get her for a holiday, she told her that I beat her and threatened to fire her. Her mom said, "Did you deserve it?" Ha!




I haven't any of my own drawings to share at the moment because they're all in the sketchbook that Bill gave me for Valentine's day and I don't usually lug it to work.

Someone needs to invent:
A bag that is big enough to carry
1. gym clothes, shoes, and accessories
2. necessary daytime objects like a wallet, a planner, umbrella, hats, and chapsticks and pens
3. a largish sketchbook
4. lunches of varying sizes
THat is also
Not cumbersome
THat is also
Very attractive.

(And under $100...)