Holiday Filter

Not traveling for the holiday. I am displacing my need for travel by hanging more and more lights.

Got this groovy bokeh filter set though. These are our "sunroom" windows.

Library Book of the Week: Holiday Edition

Back in 1968 when this book was published, you didn’t have to say but one long word to let people know it is HOLIDAY time. You said, “Sugarplums.” And the world knew.

Now in 2012, sugarplums no longer exists but we are left with visions of them.

The cover of this book is in the style of some of my favorite sixties Peter Max type illustrations. The inside is only black and white, not a whole lot of pictures but there are a few gems. Like this one:

Here are a few more photos that Mimi would want you to enjoy!

Another Placeholder Post

IMAG6001 
Originally uploaded by kayekilla.

It is finally cold enough in Memphis to wear animal-knits (mohair, wool, etc). I'm so behind on everything. Instead of blogging here or finishing grading end-of-semester papers, I put up holiday lights all over our place. Priorities.

Until I can get back to it, please enjoy this photo of a beloved house cat preserved in time through the art of taxidermy. I saw this and many other impressive pieces at a show in Michigan. Of course.

From the Ashes

....of crumpled kleenexes, barf bags, Cheratussin AC, and some other crap, I have risen!

I was too sick to do any.thing. last week. My friends tell me that the flu going around has made media headlines. I say they are underestimating how bad it is. I recommend that we bring lady gloves and face masks back into fashion. And children, while they did brighten my recent Thanksgiving holiday, need to be quarantined until springtime. Just tell them Santa wants them to stay in their room.

I'll post deep thoughts and bourbon barrel pictures when I get caught up with the rest of  the mess around me. Getting deathly ill right after a long trip is bad news for household chores and work projects.

Starting From the Top Trip Review: Skies

Survival Skills

I haven’t been posting much because I have been on the road, but don’t worry – I am ok thanks to finding this invaluable survival pack:

The kit doesn’t come with instructions but you can pretty much gather from the photo on the display that you can survive anything, including the scratchy trees and aggressive wildlife of the Australian outback, using a four-piece manicure set.

As long as I make it through the next twenty-four hours without having to file a kangaroo to death, I’ll be back in the regular world soon, loaded with stories of Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky and all the blurry road signs in between.

The Road

Internet and cell phone reception has been spotty. I’ve been able to upload pictures here though.

So far I have seen two different deer families. Total deer count is at seven. One  crew of four in my parent’s back yard and another pack of three on a dirt service road. How do I know they were families? I guess I don’t, but they seemed to be together. Maybe they were deer gangs. Orphaned deer that form a makeshift family after the circumstances of hunting season have left them to live in a small space where seven deer have to stop being polite and start getting real.

We met some friends for dinner tonight at a place in the northern burbs. We took roads like “Duck Lake Road” and “Cooley Road” and “Bogie Lake Road”.  The sun was going down pretty quickly (it gets dark at 2:30pm here) and we had to swerve around trucks on the side of the road because so many dudes (and maybe some gals) had stopped for a post-work hunt. We saw a few people wandering in the woods with their guns and their orange vests. Orange vests over business casual wear. I like that image. Reminded me a little bit of living in California and how all the surfers parked along the highway to have an evening surf – it was kind of like that expect the shooting animals and tying them to the back of your truck part. Somewhere in the world there is a post-work-surf-hunt hybrid activity going on.

I like the post-work activities here in Dearborn:

More later. Due to the internet connection, the chances of this post posting before December 2012 are slim.

Library Book of The Week: Feline Stars

Another astrology book! This one is cat themed and has beautiful, or should I say, purrrrrfect illustrations of housecats and their corresponding zodiac sign.   Some of you may recognize this from my instagram – but I really wanted to show more pictures (no filters needed). Ladies and gents, I present to you STAR CATS!





Cats are just like the signs of the zodiac! Individual temperaments and interests. Like my sign, Cancer, or the Chesterton cat, enjoys water and sand creatures. TRUE.





Look! The Chesterton has a clipped ear! Sign of a cancerian fighter perhaps?
Some Sagittarius cat dog-eared a page! Typical.



Cats, cosmic relationships, and comets:



I really want to meet the author, Lesley Ann:

That’s it for now. I’m on the road! Holiday road trip! I’m such a Chesterton.

Lazy Bloggers Make Lists

A list from the week:

• My favorite Pinterest boards are these.
• Mercury is in retrograde so of course my old desktop (kept alive since 2005 and used to download things from unreputable sources) crashed on Wednesday. I hope to resuscitate the hard drives. If I can’t, I won’t be posting for weeks because I will be crying that whole time. Did I leave precious photos and writing and video memories on there? Yes. When is the last time I backed that up? 2005.
• I started taking a pottery class because I need something sensible to fall back on in this economy – I feel like handicrafts and the plumbing trade are sure bets for the future. My interest in clay isn’t completely unfounded. I have a thing for Beatrice Wood and I studied what they call “fine art” in undergrad. I took many ceramics classes and I was very into pinch pots. This new class might be one of the best things that happened to me all week! It is during the day at a community center in a suburb of the city so can you imagine who is taking a pottery class in the middle of the day in a southern suburb? If you said the cast of Steel Magnolias – you are right!
• We put a new behind-the-scenes video up here from The Keepers. It is from one of the pre-production tours we took with the incredibly darling primate keeper. If you are a feeling human being, you will be charmed. If you are a chimp you will be like, “Yeah. Whatever. I can do that.”
• I was a week late renewing my car registration and it didn’t even cost me one penny extra. I wish I would have pushed this further.

Have a hellofa weekend.

Ahhh-merica

I love election time and cotton season. That up above is from my trip to class last night.

Library Book of the Week: Election Edition

Chill out y’all. I have it on good authority, as in – from a reference book (don’t even THINK about checking it out from the library – it has to stay there), that in 2012 – the incumbent will win the election.

The Astrological Chart of the United States was published in 1976 (maybe as a bicentennial gift?) by Stein and Day. That is the author Gar Osten up there. Down below you can see how he has charted out some of the major events of the United States of America.

But here you see where he puts all of this information to use. The book has general social trend  and political predictions, sectioned in two year increments, for the US that date up until 2141.

Check out this take-it-to-the-bank prediction for 2011-2012:

If you missed that:

I am assuming Obama’s people already know this astrological fact. BUT – do they know THIS:

Re-election followed by a two year period of impeachments and assassination attempts.

Of course, we should consider the source, this prediction has been slow to come to full realization:

I don’t know though, being “chosen” as the outer space channel would explain the upsurge in reality television programming. Hey-yo!

So that is your library book find of the week. Have a good election day, vote if you feel like you can change the destiny of something already determined by the stars (and superPACs). I leave you with two of my favorite library images -  the telephone and the little scrap paper holder:

Weekend Insider

The weather in Memphis this weekend was a bright and breezy golden-kissed howdy-do-fall handshake with mother nature. I spent probably 80% of it indoors watching movies at the Indie Memphis Film Festival.

I saw some good stuff, went to the wrong place a couple times, chatted up strangers, drank full-on HFCS coke, cried while watching a documentary about video games, and even lightened up on my punch-people-who-look-at-their-cell-phones-during-movies policy (hey it’s a festival – people are on a schedule) for a little while. 

I did walk out of two movies, I don’t walk out of many movies (I won’t even let my friends leave baseball games until they are officially over, no matter how many extra innings they run) and I won’t tell you which ones, but I can tell you that no one would walk out of any of my movies because I have a couple built-in foolproof mechanisms that ensure this would never happen.

These safeguards involve techniques like having some kind of intro title that says, "Stay in your seats, we have someone coming around to hand out a special surprise!" Another strategy has my friends pose as violent security officers at the doors refusing to let people out. Or maybe my mom, or any midwestern mom for that matter, standing at the door catching folks trying to walk out, asking them, “Oh did you need something? What do you need? Can I scramble you an egg? Go back to your seat. I’ll bring you something. Do you need a blanket?”

If there is one thing I learned from the festival panels these past few days, is that you have to think about these things. This is a new age of entertainment. We have a new kind of audience. Their brains are disintegrating! Film is interactive! You can’t just hand your ideas over to some producer and think they are going to make it happen. You have to believe, be smart, and follow through to the end – all the way to the doors of the theater.

I’m not sure if anyone said that in those precise terms, but it is what I gleaned from their body language and eye movements.  It’s just a gift I have. I know what people mean instead of what they say.

And - speaking of being gifted, I happen to have a true gift of enthusiasm for teaching, but a gift that I don’t have is: interest for the giant m-effing stack of essays that these classes seem to produce every other week. Like the one I am looking at now. Who is assigning this sh*t?! I need to stagger these due dates. Where is my TA? What else can I write about to procrastinate getting started?

Topics I am interested in and considering rambling about instead of getting to work right now:

1. LA Lakers – Why do they control my boyfriends mind?
2. Guy at the Hop-in who ID-ed me and said “whoa” when he looked at the date
3. The good movies at the IMFF
4. Sympathetic magic: similarity and contagion
5. Mumblecore – trends I drank through
6. Joyce Jillson
7. Arkansas PBS Show – Squirrel Enchiladas
8. Media literacy in this day and age
9. Oxblood – trendy color or medieval beauty treatment?
10. Camo photography gear (as seen on Arkansas PBS Show)

I’ll save those for later and get down to business (for now). Hope y’all had a happy weekend.

Oh - If you were wondering – I heard from Sargent Sparkle today. She’s already teaching the Afghani’s the cupid shuffle. More later.

Our New Pitch Video

Our ten-minute preview for The Keepers is awesome, but too long, and almost too “complete” to be a pitch video so we made a new one that explains why we need the dough:

An Explanation from True Story Pictures on Vimeo.

http://www.indiegogo.com/thekeepersmovie

Driving By the Light of the Moon

Happy Halloween. I have been videoing while driving again. You won’t catch me, cops, because these are empty delta roads (kind of).

Arkansas October Moon Drive from Sara Kaye on Vimeo.

Experimental video in the sense that I experiment with crap footage and risking my life while driving.

Anyone have cellphone camera dashboard tripod ideas/hacks? I am thinking there has to be a way to incorporate silly putty or 3M hang tags…

Yellow Ribbons and House Plants

 

I came up with a mascot for my sister while she is deployed. She is in the army. I think the world will come to know her as Sargent Sparkle. 

I found this grow-your-own grass kit at a the Midtown CVS (the same one that was vehemently protested by locals last year because they had to tear down a beautiful historic church to put in this drugstore, but, as we all know, everything happens for a reason and had they not torn down that historic church I would not have found this little fella on clearance for seventy-five cents) and I thought I would send her pictures of it as it grew. My thinking is that nothing brightens a day at war like grass coming out of a ceramic frog’s head. Also, it is pro-active to find something to do when you’re experiencing a distressing event that is out of your control.

Well, here is a little something you can put in the bank: it is very easy to grow grass. This guy shot up like a weed. I suppose that is to be expected, however I don’t have a lot of experience with living plants so I was convinced that the success was a positive omen. Here he is in the original packaging and just two days after planting!

 

So, my sis was deployed to Afghanistan today. She left in the morning and had a chance to text me a few things before she was officially incommunicado. Like this photo of lunch:

(Unauthorized) pic of her last American meal. We could do better than vienna sausages for our troops, but then again I am not a soldier trained to withstand all kinds of challenging and adverse conditions. 

The last thing I heard from her was that she was about to board a Boeing 777 and that was just precious because we had just toured the Boeing plant back in August. Her text said that she let her bosses know “If it ain’t a boeing, I’m not going (to the ‘ghan).” That shows you how much pull she has around there!

Now she is gone and I gave the mascot a warrior buzz cut. She told me that the soldiers fly over holding all of their gear. Sounds dreadful. And I thank her for her service.

Side note: A yellow ribbon means all kinds of things, but I am going to say it means I am waiting for a soldier to come home.

Library Book Look of the Week: Picture Gallery Pioneers

   

Picture Gallery Pioneers; 1850 to 1875 By Ralph W Andrews

Copyright 1964. First Edition.

This book is full of pictures and stories about the first people that started photography studios. Studio, being a very loose term back then, considering lots of these dudes were out slinging heavy equipment in gold prospecting camps. I can barely stand to look at it too log without passing out because it combines all of my great loves: travel, the wild west, photograph, prospectin’, early city living, mountain climbing in suits and bussels, and the giant forest.

(checked out from the Memphis Public Library)

A Leisurely Death

I’m a fan of the site 750Words. If you already write every day or want to combine a private online journal (or public journal if you want the world to know that you are “in a good place” or “not in a good place” – the things I imagine other people journaling about) with the Jerry Seinfeld X-marks-the-day-don’t-break-the-chain type writing motivation tool, you should check it out.

What I like most is how it gives you an analysis of how fast you wrote and what you wrote about and you can compare yourself with the rest of the “world” (world meaning the other people who like to type into websites).

I wasn’t too surprised to see this breakdown of me vs the world average:

While the world worries about their death, I worry about my free time, because, well, I’ve already had a couple near-death experiences and I know that the only thing worth worrying about is whether or not I am going to be trapped in some kind of staff meeting or whether or not I am going to miss a great local festival (like the possum festival next weekend) or the chance to watch 12 hours of post-debate MSNBC. Obviously these results are scientific.

Won’t you join me?