Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

I don't know if I mentioned or not, but kittenpants and I will have a booth in the art and craft show at North KC's Snake Saturday, this Saturday, 3/10. If you have a desire in your heart to own some of Kittenpants' art or lovely jewelry made by me, you might drop by.

Also, seriously, I need to break into the newage* jewelry market. I'm working too hard.

*rhymes with sewage. There is a reason for this.

When I got this job, the office was "decorated" with little Jesus things, the Footprints thing, "A Special Prayer For The Parents Of Handicapped Children", and similar dreck, which all went away as soon as I moved in. (Well, almost all. Someone had taped a Bible verse to the inside of the desk cubby, which reads "Therefore encourage each other, and build up each other, as indeed you are doing", and which is apparently from the epistle to the Thessalonians. Out of context like that, I think it's fine advice for people of any faith, so it stayed. But the rest of it? Gone!)

And since I moved in, the office has been pretty sparse, except for the flat surfaces, which are covered in paperwork. The walls are a crappy sort of putty color. I had intended to paint over that, but due to a miscommunication about when the carpet was coming in, that didn't happen. It's probably just as well, because the sage green color I had chosen to go on the walls would have been really awful with the navy blue baseboards they put in without telling us about. Of course, they look pretty bad with the putty color, too, but I digress.

The point is, my office needs a little love of the artistic variety. I'd like to buy some prints to hang about. I'm sort of at a sticking point, though, because the sort of thing that I like (which tends to include weapons, nudity, wierd machinery, wierd machinery fused to more-or-less human bodies, monsters, robots, and deities of cultures I don't technically belong to) is not the sort of thing that will go over well at the office. (When you come right down to it anyway, I'm not much for art. The one "piece of art" that I have ever actually owned is a colored pencil and perhaps watercolor of a little red-haired angel with gears and struts in her wings.) And I'd really rather not own the sorts of pictures of cats, flowers, serene seaside scenes, sailboats, and little children kissing that seem to be in vogue in office art.

So, surely, some of you lot are more up on art than my humble self. Can anyone point me to an artist who makes things that are office-acceptable and yet still interesting? Or a site that sells prints of same?

EDIT: I could probably get away with something like this, don't you think?

Happinesses of the weekend:
- Bought three new shirts at the Gaia Garage sale for .25 each. Some of them even look good on, I hear.
- Got to cut niveus_tigris out of a too-small dress that he very cleverly tried on at said Garage Sale and subsequently could not get out of. Contributed $2.00 (which accounted for all the cash then in my pocket) to Gaia for the price of the dress and the privilege of cutting him out of it. It was a good day to be carrying a pair of scissors.
- On Saturday, triadruid, upon pulling an armload of warm towels from the dryer, came and hugged me with said armload of warm towels. That, children, is love.
- RfB did not suck, even though I had to present a budget that included nothing but the absolute essential things we had to have in order to keep Gaia Community running. Nobody cried. Not even me, and I thought I might do so while we were in process of making the budget. Still, we can pay all the essentials, and that's good!
- Sunday's ritual was accomplished with very little drama outside of that strictly required by the narrative of the ritual. It only sucked in some parts. And now, I am done with it, which makes me feel much better.
- Sunday evening, discovered that kittenpants does not care for the corn on the cob one gets at Chili's. She is more than happy to give me hers, which is good, since that is usually my favorite part of a Chili's meal.
- Also Sunday evening, triadruid and I acquired a bottle of Aberlour a'bunadh, which neither of us had tried before. I like it, even though it has the sherry flavor that I abhor in the Glenmorangie we had lately. For the record, it is a wonderful world that continues to provide me with single malt whiskys that I have not yet tried. We resolved to start taking notes on our whiskys now that we have graduated to the phase of whisky drinking where you can no longer remember what you have and have not drunk.
- And then, there's kittenpants' note from the Dragon*Con folks. Yay for being in the art show! We spent some quality tub-time brainstorming about paintings she could do and enter. This is always good times, because together she and I are much funnier than we are individually, and also because discussion of paintings generally leads to discussion of who among the friend set we might talk into posing sans pants. And really, who doesn't like that?

OK. Here's the deal, because there's nobody in the office today and I can spend the time to type this all out again. This morning, I made a poll. LJ ate it. It was about boys kissing, and I am sad to see that it has gone. So I thought, perhaps I'll talk about the results from the last poll, the one about showing your bits for art, because that was interesting in parts...
( Geekery, ho! )

Also, if anybody would like to discuss their attitudes and reactions to boys kissing (or girls kissing, or boys and girls kissing), even though the poll has vanished into the ether, that would also be welcome here.

Here's the thing. I wouldn't go around asking to see everybody's bits without a good reason. I'm not sure that this is a good reason, but the request was only hypothetical anyway.

The day after Thanksgiving, we went out for some exploration in Iowa City, which is much more interesting than somewhere in Iowa has any right to be, and we found a gallery. In the window was a larger-than-life ball gown made of twisted silver wire and mesh. It was intriguing, and so we wandered in.

For our house, a trip to a gallery is often an exercise in "I can make that" and/or "Wow, I'm not charging enough for the things that I make that are like that", and this was no exception. We wandered around and rated the pieces on inspiration, difficulty to copy, and likelihood of self-injury in the process. And then, we discovered that the gallery had a basement.

In the basement was all of the stuff they couldn't display upstairs, either for lack of space, or lack of completion, or other reasons. At the foot of the stairs sat a glass display case. On top of the case were some porcelain beetles, which were compelling enough that we wanted to spend some time looking at them. And then, I looked through the case top and spoke the fateful words... "Is that a ceramic chicken with a penis head?"

And lo, it was. Some clever and enterprising fellow in Iowa City sculpts birds. A great number of birds. But where the bird's head should be is, in every case, a penis head. He had a chicken. He had a peacock. He had a woodpecker. He had a kiwi, which was especially disturbing due to length of head, and also due to the lack of an obvious penis pun.

Later, I was discussing it with infintysquared. He said "What do you think the artistic statement is there?" And I said, "I think it's huh-huh, huh-huh, I made a cock. But it was like, a cock. huh-huh."

And it came to me in that moment that what might be very entertaining to do would be to make a chess set in which all the pieces were penises, or bits thereof. So I started talking about this to kittenpants and triadruid. We talked about what the various pieces would look like, and whether you could make more-or-less traditionally shaped pieces that were also penises, and whether if you had the queen as a penis with a rubber on (the reservoir tip taking the place of the traditional ball crown on the queen) people might think it was some sort of commentary on HIV. And eventually, the conversation turned to "But how would you make the pieces?" triadruid asked if I would cast from life. And I thought, "Um. I don't think I could talk enough people into letting me handle their cocks to make that work." He thought perhaps I could, if I told them it was for artistic purposes.

And I think that's where we came in.

OK. I swear to gods there is context for this, but I think I'll get a better data set if I don't give it just yet. This poll is mostly for the male-bodied folks, but female-bodied folks are also welcome to answer, for the purposes of Science, and stuff.

[Poll #621624]

Also, in unrelated news, we watched Velvet Goldmine last night. We in this case means me, triadruid, and saffronhare. The film is beautiful, but really, really bad. The whole viewing experience was a little like Mystery Science Theater 3000, the Sexual Tension Edition. I mean, really, the only good bit about the film is that a)Ewan McGregor takes his pants off, b) Jonathan Rhys Meyers wears a dress, and c)Ewan McGregor's character and Jonathan Rhys Meyers' character shag. Which is, really, when you think about it, pretty good. Unfortunately, it's wrapped up in an overwrought piece of incomprehensible, badly-lit, badly-scripted fluff that for some reason also includes UFOs, Oscar Wilde, a mysterious fellow called Jack Fairy who may or may not even be involved in the plot of the film, but shows up at critical junctures anyway, and some fairly unlikely shots of schoolgirls and small boys, interspersed. Also, perhaps, Duran Duran. I'm not sure about that last bit. I wasn't sure about a lot of bits. Most of the movie was spent alternating between going "wow, that's hot" and "what the hell?".

Also, I totally have a complex now about the fact that I will never, ever, ever, be as pretty as Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Ah well.