Are you sick of tedious rendevous instead of hot bang?

are those yr boobs I saw on an east village mailbox?

Just this once let’s get Wednesday off to a slightly sleazy start, as if this were a meeting of the Slightly Sleazy Wednesday Morning Club. The inspiration for / title of this post comes from an email I received from Ms. Kitty Geyser. Also from a neighbor in my ex-boyfriend’s building, where I lived for many years. He’s a beardo we call Cameras on account of the unfriendly, searching looks he gives us. He says hello to my ex-boyfriend but he’s never spoken a word to me. Our friend Christine said we are his Berlin-in-the-20s. I admit to having slithered in or out of the building looking Anita Berber-ish on a few occasions over the years, but the latest thing that set his eye- and beard-cameras on fire was a basket on my ex’s bike. He got a wicker basket for it, which is apparently one of the fruitiest fruity things a guy can do. He came out of the apartment with it and ran into Cameras and his roommates, and reported that their eyes were glued to it like hot burning lasers all the way down the stairs.

Anyhow, our meeting, yeah. It’s totally fine if you’re still wearing your outfit from last night, I don’t mind at all.

photo from a 1980 sci-fi convention here

While you’re washing your face the rest of us will have a look at this poster I found for an interesting-sounding movie from the 70s, Orgies au Camping. Poster from Etsy here.

Here’s a lurid little painting by Reggie Kray, Ron and Reg in Top Hat and Tails, via The Guardian.

And here’s a flier I found at an art opening at Family Business gallery a couple weeks ago. My friend Jim had a piece in this show. I like what they did; it’s a tiny gallery and they crammed it full, with art all the way up the walls and hanging from the ceiling too. There were lots of these fliers thrown out to the crowd, all different.

Ann Sorel, “Amour à Plusieurs,” via Vinyle Archéologie on YouTube. I tried to translate the lyrics to this because it sounded intriguing. I wish I hadn’t because it’s actually kind of a downer: “Love to many it is not good for your heart.” Shit no, it sure isn’t.

Here’s a Yayoi Kusama orgy / happening in Amsterdam, 1969, via the Looniverse. I don’t know whether they did have an orgy that day or was she just selling copies of her orgy newspaper. The woman in the blue suit appears to be afraid someone will grope her eyeballs, but everyone’s got plenty of clothes on. Maybe it was called off on account of shivery weather.

Bettie Page photo via Olympia le Tan’s blog, which has a nice mixture of things I like to look at: loads more photos of Bettie and Bettie look-alikes, loads of photos of Morrissey, plus some shoes, plus the book-shaped handbags she makes.

Bettie via Olympia Le Tan’s blog

Olympia Le Tan bags via Hint

If we’re going to meet mornings this way semi-regularly you’re going to need to get your own coffee pipe. I don’t mean to be bossy, I just want to get everyone on the same page here. You can order one from Zang! (via Dangerous Minds). I think you should fill yours up with my current favorite Brazilian espresso and some super silver haze, which I’ve heard from a friend is a champagne among herbs. Some things just go together. I think this could be the next coffee Thing, now that everyone’s experimented with pour-over-brewing fair trade single-origin coffees crapped out by greasy jungle cats, finding the right boutique weed to complement and enhance your coffee.

If you titrate yourself correctly maybe you’ll see an apple in your cappuccino.

Don’t get too messy with all this stuff. Here are some informational AA comics if you’re the type we should be worried about.

“It Happened to Alice” via coisas do arco da velha

north fork

When I said I was going to the beach last week my destination was Orient Point, at the end of the north fork of Long Island. I’d never been there before and was surprised and thrilled that it’s relatively easy to find a deserted or nearly-deserted beach there. I feel like I can tell you people — you lot are mostly continental or English and you’ve got your own lovable beaches much closer to home — but don’t tell anyone else.

Sometimes the nicest thing is to not have anyone else around.

It’s all the more exciting to find a deserted beach with interesting structures on it, like this driftwood teepee-cabana.

Or to find a beach where a sailboat with flashy silver sails appears on the horizon. My friend thought this was very Matthew Barney-ish but it remained too far away to see whether the mast was made of vaseline.

Driftwood legs, agreed? The navel is low but those are legs.

Our favorite beach find was this oceanographic sofa, where thoughtful beachcombers can sit comfortably and think about special rocks or driftwood wants and needs.

My friends were directed to the beach with the oceanographic sofa earlier in the week, when they arrived and discovered that the rental kitchen lacked a cutting board — people at the Orient Country Store knew it would be a good place to forage for a driftwood cutting board. Two designers in our party were inspired by the tremendous driftwood selection and made a chair too. It wasn’t quite complete when I took this photo but you get the idea.

If you want to commission a driftwood chair or set of chairs I could probably hook you up. It would take a week or so to make so there’s the cost of lodging to factor in, plus me to document the process, plus an assistant for me, but think of how amazing your new chairs would be. Seriously, think about it.

You can see one of our driftwood cutting boards in the photo below of some farmstand herbs I made focaccia with. The focaccia was initially a disaster (it took three women wielding spatulas and knives to dislodge it from the pan it clung to, then was successfully resuscitated in breadcrumb form and used to stuff tiny peppers) but the driftwood cutting board was an unqualified success and we brought it to the Country Store to show it off to Miriam, one of the proprietors. Manhattan desperately needs small, friendly Urban Stores where people can exchange useful information and buy whatever little things they have a pressing need for, some candles or seltzer or a slice of peach-brown butter tart still warm from the oven. We have bodegas of course but I don’t think I’ve ever obtained any truly useful information under fluorescent lights because no one wants to chat when everyone looks hideous. Plus there is never a front porch and they are not run by bakers. There are some people who built a porch on their roof in the West Village and there’s been at least one gallery porch I recall, so I don’t see why this couldn’t happen.

Also nice to have around: farms and farmstands and wineries. Here is a lavender farm where bees live in lavender beehives.

I didn’t see any lavender honey for sale but we did come home with a good-looking melon. Russians pickle the rind and other people make things with the seeds, but who has ideas about how to make curly watermelon tails into something?

We didn’t eat the melon tail but we did have a terrific salad with flowers and pickled beets in it, and afterwards I thought about starting a new food blog that has only remnants of food on it. There’s probably already a Tumblr called Fuck Yeah Plate Study. Hmm.

We didn’t spend the entire time eating salads; there was also a fair amount of bicycling around and looking at things like ospreys in their nests.

There was a sandy beach much easier on the feet than the rocky ones we visited but it has umbrella rules.

Do you prefer to read serious or fluffy books on the beach? I don’t think I have ever had a preference. It’s easy to get distracted by people-watching / -listening but sometimes little distractions are the perfect punctuation for serious sentences.

We stayed near a marina where children sometimes practice sailing in tiny white sailboats. A fine thing to watch from a porch, but I would not want to be responsible for keeping them from heading out to sea. If someone had sat seven-years-old me in a boat just my size I probably would not be here writing this blog; I’d be on a small, grubby island wearing a seaweed turban and blogging about that instead.

1-2-3 plant vs. 1-2-3-4-5 plant

1-2-3 plant encountered in Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, Queens. 1-2-3-4-5 plant encountered in Chatfield Hollow State Park, Killingworth, CT.

!

I went to CT for the weekend and had my first hike of spring on Saturday at Chatfield Hollow State Park in Killingworth, CT. That sort of thing can be very exciting in its way. Do you people like nature? I find it tremendously restorative to walk in the woods, even when it’s chilly and damp and the trees are still bare.

What sort of creature lives inside an exclamation point-shaped hidey hole?

Here’s the beguiling Flintstonian lavender floor at the Parthenon Diner, Old Saybrook, CT. While I was taking this photo my stepfather said “That is a very famous pattern. It’s called ‘bathroom floor.’”

f / m / k The Professor, Diva, Dude, Ginormous Egg? They’re at the Stop n’ Shop in Old Saybrook.

Sunday was too cold for hiking so we bundled up and went for a walk on the beach instead.

Saw this on the way home on I-95. Go ahead and take down the number for your friend. You can’t really see it here but one of the people painted on the windows is saying “hey man, got a smoke?”

There are older photos from a similar field trip on my other blog here if you are really into having a mental visit to CT today. Playlist too.

found – two horses

I found this photo on the sidewalk this morning a few doors down from my building. It was with a bunch of not-very-interesting party shots and Trivial Pursuit cards. Did these horses wrong you somehow, neighbor?