I N T H E N I G H T K I T C H E N 12.8.2000
Last night turned out to be quite brilliant. I started at the Market Street Pub for a beer, bowl of Potato Leek Soup and a side of fries. I decided to bring along Fight Club and reread it. This passage almost made me go shoot myself: "Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash. Anything you're ever proud of will be thrown away." After a fairly quiet meal I went over to the Portland Art Museum for the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Artists) vendor showcase. Basically, there were over a dozen print shops and paper makers there handing out samples of their wares. This stuff can be pretty cool -- it ends up being as much about graphic art as paper weights and ink quality. I scored some lovely postcards and random flim-flam but the biggest grab of the night, for me anyway, was a copy of Critique magazine. There's a printer up in Vancouver who prints the magazine and it costs $28 an issue. I've checked it out before but there's just no way that I'm going to pay that much money for a magazine. It really is a lovely magazine printed on lovely paper with very high quality inks. After a couple hours everyone gathered towards the back of the ballroom for a presentation by Mikon van Gastel from Imaginary Forces. Imaginary Forces is a company who specializes in and gained fame for their movie intro credits. Seven really launched them to the forefront. Mikon talked about how he came to work for them and then went through and talked about their process for making some of the intros that they have done. We saw Sphere which is a really nice series of typography and imagery in its own right but learning about the process made it even more awe-inspiring. He also showed The Avengers, Arlington Road and Bicentennial Man. He seemed really proud of the Avengers piece -- or maybe he was just excited about the process -- but I thought Bicentennial Man was really good. It was very cute and very clever and they were forced to work within some constraints that they really didn't like. There was one tiny bit of it that got a little too clever but on the whole I really enjoyed it. He also showed some commercials that they did and a huge amount of work that they did with IBM and a group of architects to create this massive space in Chicago to introduce IBM's ebusiness concepts to new and potential clients. That piece is really too extensive to get into here but, again, their process was fascinating and I was highly, highly jealous of what they get to do. 12.7.2000
Yesterday and today the cat has been stomping around the house, giving me the stink-eye and generally looking like a downtrodden refugee. I got sick of it this afternoon and plopped him on the couch and took a blanket and made a sort of tent over him. He slept there for four hours. Sometimes you just need to hide away from the world a little bit. On that note, I'm heading out to this AIGA-sponsored thing at the Portland Art Museum tonight. Looks like I'm going to be going by myself and I'm feeling a little bit like a social retard. I've been sitting at my computer all day doing a few mildly productive things but I feel wierd. I've barely spoken today and I'm worried about interacting in meatspace. The downside of freelancing. Oh well. Fuck it. I'm bringing business cards and I will try and schmooze. 12.5.2000
Sooooful I've just made some spinach souffle triangles for this potluck I'm going to tonight. The theme is "finger foods" and the recipe is my mother's. Actually, it's not so much a recipe as an excercise in patience as one attempts to delicately wrangle very-fragile Philo dough into little butter-covered triangles with spinach on the inside. I could be making just a few more right now but I give up. I know I don't have enough for everybody but my fingers are doughy, my back is aching from leaning over them and I think I'm out of butter. I just can't forget the cinnamon. 12.4.2000
Melancholy Night T. and I stayed awake for awhile last night feeling depressed about how far away our families are. His are especially far away over in Virginia. It seems difficult to get out there. However, his father is visiting this weekend and his sister was here two weeks ago which I think is remarkably fortunate. He also got to see his family not more than a couple months ago. So, it must be a bit of the holiday blues. We are going out to see my family over the New Year's holiday. His boss wasn't wanting to give him the time off but we're doing it anyway. It'll be a joy to do some skiing, play in the snow and then kick back and relax. The hardest thing this holiday season will be convincing T. that we shouldn't spend a ton of money on each other. See, I find the joy of being able to pay bills and not worry about paying our rent to be much more satisfying. However, in the spirit of consumer madness here's some things on my list:
And I better not forget my Amazon wishlist. I should go put a DVD player on there just in case I win the daily giveaway (which I firmly believe is a myth). 12.3.2000
T. recommends skipping the "Colossal Dog" Last night, T. and I joined Byrne and hubby at an Oregon Ducks basketball game held at the Rose Garden. Apparently, they do one there every year. We had the sweetest seats -- center court, about twenty rows back. It was amazing to not have to keep glancing up at the big screen to see what was going on -- we could see it all. They ended up very nicely beating UMass, 91-76, with some truly stunning teamwork and impossible shots. Bryan Bracey is one of their star players and he's pretty amazing to watch. He nailed a number of 3-pointers as well as some under-the-basket scrambles that looked impossible. The play of the night was from a guy named Jones, I think, who rebounded himself three times to finally get the shot. Do I know basketball? Not very well but that was a lot of fun. I think I can say that I like basketball much better than football. I feel like football goes so slow and it's so agonizing as they move down the field one yard at a time. And, it's all about slamming into each other and getting concussions and throwing the ball and not catching the ball, throwing not catching, throwing not catching and, once more, a throw but no catch. Drives me batty. Football seemingly goes on forever, as well. If there's ten minutes left in the fourth quarter that means there's about an hour left. Granted, there seemed to be a ton of fouls in the game last night and the crowd was getting a little sick of it. But all in all I really enjoyed it. Shit. I don't want to be a basketball fan. 
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