I was drawn to some of the same artists this year that i have enjoyed in years past, which means that if i had, say, and extra $1,300 lying around it would be well worth it to invest in a painting since my taste isn’t changing too rapidly. If only! Anyway, here are some of my faves:

Bruce Holwerda

I posted about this artist last time, but i was very happy to see him return to the festival this year because i think his paintings are so lovely and interesting.

Rick Preston

I’m always drawn to the photography, as you can see…

Andrew Sofjani

David Powers

It seems that strong, simple forms are what i enjoy the most. There were a couple of other painters that i enjoyed a lot but they have crap for websites so i couldn’t find good images to post. I also wanted to mention Keith Grace‘s work again but i couldn’t find images of his new object-on-gray pieces.

Check ‘em out, and if you missed the festival this year, i highly recommend that you not miss out again next year!

The first time i saw this movie was about three years ago and I pretty much hated it. I was told that without the context of the Syfy show Firefly on which it’s based, it probably wasn’t as good. So this spring when Nathan started watching episodes of Firefly on Netflix Instant Play, i wasn’t very interested at first. However, unlike Stargate which failed to interest me even after several chances, the show soon drew me in and Nathan and i finished up the one and only season together in no time. Afterward we watched Serenity, which was SO MUCH BETTER the second time.

So then a couple weeks ago i heard via twitter about this event called Can’t Stop the Serenity. There are a lot of Firefly fans out there (called “browncoats”) whose love for the series has only been fueled by the fact that it was canceled so early on and by their hopes that it might be revived again some day. These fans get together once a year in quite a few different cities around the world to watch Serenity on the big screen. I figured the event would probably be a nerdfest and thus a pretty awesome time. I had no idea.

First there was a costume contest which we missed and which we realized once we got there that we probably could have won if we’d dressed up. There were door prizes which included Anime box sets, chopsticks-and-pocky combinations and Firefly fanclub memorabilia. We won some fake Firefly universe currency – w00t! There was a showing of Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which we discovered is a short musical starring Neil Patrick Harris that was directed by Joss Whedon, the same guy who did Firefly (and a lot of other stuff, it turns out). That was pretty enjoyable. And then, of course, there was Serenity. (Which was STILL BETTER the third time around.)

But besides all of the delightful nerdery, there was a really good cause for all of this. I knew that the proceeds were going to be donated to a charity, but i was excited to learn that Equality Now is an organization that essentially fights against the things i hate the most in this world: rape, domestic violence, reproductive rights violations, trafficking, female genital mutilation, and gender discrimination. Unfortunately, i didn’t learn about this until after the silent auction had ended or i probably would have ponied up at least fifty bucks for a graphic novel to benefit this organization right then and there. (I can still donate, of course, but i won’t get a sweet comic book out of it.)

The main aim of Equality Now is to facilitate awareness about the atrocities being committed against women every day all over the world. It upsets me enough that i find it hard to write about, but this is something i think is really important so please check out their website and be sure to like them on facebook!

So nerdy sci-fi love + proceeds going to a great cause = a really awesome event that i’m already planning to attend again next year. And with that, i’ve just destroyed whatever “cool points” i may have gained with my big bro by drinking IPAs with him over the past couple of weeks.

Saturday we celebrated my friend Calee‘s move back to Ames from Des Moines by hitting the town with her. We got barbecue at Uncle Wendel’s and then went to see the Des Moines Derby Dames‘ roller-derby bout. We lost to the Old Capital City Roller Girls, but it was a fun experience despite the fact that i had to sit on a concrete floor in my short skirt. Hopefully next time they’ll do it in a venue with more seating.

After that we headed to The Lift where i had a grand total of 3.25 drinks and ended up drunk enough to say quite a few silly things, but unfortunately not so wasted that i couldn’t remember them. That Bradie was trying to kill me. I don’t really want to talk about it except to say that i’m sorry if i offended anyone but i had a good time.

Yesterday evening we went over to my grandpa’s house where my mother had been seeing barred owls in the trees for the past few nights. At first we didn’t see them, but Mom was sure they were around because of the commotion from the smaller birds. Sure enough, we spotted one just as we were about to leave. There are four of them hanging around; two adults and two nearly-full-sized babies. We watched all four fly from branch to branch, saw them get pecked by the smaller birds, made noises at the juveniles who made noises back at us and bobbed their heads, and saw one adult feed her babies a small animal.

As it was getting dark, one of the younger owls perched on a post right in the backyard. I got about five paces away from it to try to take photos. It didn’t really work out because of the darkness, but it was amazing to just watch her calmly examine the ground for mice and occasionally swivel her head around to look at us.

This is how i wish my photos had turned out.

It’s been hot and humid here the past couple of days, and that will probably continue for the rest of the week. I’ve been working out several times a week in preparation for dress shopping, but i’m not sure how i’m going to run outside now. I don’t do hot & muggy.

*EDIT: Oh man, i forgot to write about our awesome waitress on Friday night! We went to a place called Paradise Pizza in WDM that we’d never been to, and we had a waitress who was probably just starting out. And had probably never been to a restaurant before. She brought us our beers with straws in them, and brought the check out to us before asking how the meal was or if we wanted any dessert. She wandered around looking bored when she wasn’t helping us. It was an all-around hilarious thing to see.

Now that everyone has gotten all pissed off about my last post, my bitching has once again been vindicated by a reversal of the bad idea at hand (see also: the Tropicana redesign and subsequent reversal after my complaint). The Des Moines Register reported today that DART will replace the Iowa Atheists & Freethinkers’ ad campaign on their buses as a result of meeting with the group earlier this week, getting a lot of complaints from people like me and being pestered by the The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa about the legality of removing the signs.

So Iowa is still a pretty cool place i guess, except for our governor Culver, who unfortunately sided with the people who were “disturbed” by the ads. That’s probably the most disappointing part of this whole controversy.

The Des Moines Register reported yesterday that some signs which had been commissioned by the Iowa Atheists & Freethinkers to appear on local DART buses were taken down on Tuesday after being up for only three days because so many people were calling DART to complain about them. The signs simply read, “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.”

I want someone to tell me how that message is offensive in any way. It’s as if believers are tortured by the mere notion that non-believers exist and might have the HUMAN emotion of loneliness, or the desire to identify with other people who feel the same way. Do you just want to think of us as inhuman or deny our existence altogether? Because that’s the only explanation i can fathom for someone wanting these signs to be taken down.

I see the “-God” billboards all the time. I see the “Babies are a gift from God!” signs all over the place. There are church marquees and hand-made “Jesus Loves You!” signs by the Iowa roadsides and bible verses on my shopping bags and cross necklaces on everyone and “In God We Trust” on my money, but i don’t have the audacity to demand that it all be removed from my sight. It’s obvious that i’m a member of a minority, and i think it’s sad that atheists can’t even reach out to one another and talk amongst ourselves because believers see that sort of public communication as an attempt to convert EVERYONE to our way of thinking. As if believers weren’t trying to do just that!

Look, i would love to be able to express the way i see things clearly enough to open someone’s eyes to it, but that is something i don’t really attempt because i feel it’s beyond my reach. Atheists aren’t trying to convert people, we are merely standing up to be counted, mainly to feel a little less alienated and alone. We just want to know that other people like us exist and let them know that they are accepted, if only by the others like us. Some groups in other states have attempted to also let the general public know that “atheist” does not necessarily mean “immoral person” (see photo above), and their efforts have been met with an identical outpouring of fear and blindness. It’s not an anti-Christian or anti-God or anti-anything message. It’s just a statement! “You don’t have to believe in God to be a good person” – how is that threatening?? Most people don’t even believe it, so why can’t they just laugh it off and go about their charmed, eternal lives?

Here are some photos of my favorite performances:

Tilly & The Wall, photo by Matt Sorensen for Rock Iowa

Girl In A Coma, photo by Laura Lou09

The Envy Corps, photo by britrockatthetop

In all, we saw:

Tilly And The Wall
Modern Skirts
Maps And Atlases
Girl In A Coma
Man Man (Nathan loved this one )
Wild Sweet Orange (disappointing)
Margo and the Nuclear So-And-Sos
Broken Social Scene (I was most looking forward to this one – pretty sweet)
The Envy Corps
Ben Harper (from afar)

Girl In A Coma took me by surprise. They’ve got a punk-y*/’90s alternative sound that i loved, and a lead vocalist with such a great voice.

To say nothing of the rain, the festival was full of people so colorful that for a moment i felt like i was back in Eugene, Oregon. There was a booth selling tie-dye, an all-vegetarian food vendor from whom i bought the most delightful coffee frappe, and a bunch of girls walking around wearing nothing but denim shorts and paint. These “painted ladies” were meant, as the artist herself said, to be “living decorations”, which i found to be terribly demeaning, but i guess it takes all kinds.

It rained lightly all day Friday and continued to be overcast on Independence Day, but by the end of The Envy Corps’s set all the dreariness had been chased away. That band never disappoints me. The crowd really got into it at this show, which can be partly attributed to the fact that by 8pm when they played, most patrons were half-saturated with Old Main beer. They put a few bars of “I Want You Back” into “Story Time” in honor, of course, of Michael Jackson, and that made me pretty happy. The fireworks display after Ben Harper was decent, and a vast improvement over the blunder last year which caused me to miss all fireworks displays altogether on the 4th.

*BTW – by “punk” i mean the original genre which arose underground in the eighties and all that sort of thing, not the whiny bands who flaunt too much eyeliner and feign a damn-the-man attitude while selling records on major RIAA-controlled labels which some people for whatever reason use the term to refer to.

The main hallway

This is what you see when you first step inside. Immediately to your right is the guest bathroom:

The Man Space

Nathan laid claim to this bathroom immediately, dubbing it the Man Space. Since it’s also the guest bathroom, i’m actually the only person who’s not allowed to use it.

Down the hall a bit and on the right we have the washer & dryer:

This is one of my favorite things about living here. No quarters, no waiting for neighbors to move their shit, no embarrassment when i accidentally leave underwear in one of the machines. Our own washer & dryer – hallelujah!

Keep going down the small hallway opposite the w&d, and you’ll see the walk-in closet, the bedroom and the wash room & second bathroom.

The closet is nice and big, but a trifle messy.

Here you can see how the rooms flow together – and my Oregon rainbow.

The sink here has its own separate room, which i call the wash room

MY toilet.

Exiting the bedroom area and continuing down the main hallway, we come upon the common area:

Which consists of the dining area, the kitchen, a small built-in granite desk just to the right of the view in the above photo, and these two sitting areas:

The reading area

The TV area

Then we head outside to the terrace:

We need some outdoor furniture. And maybe a few more plants.

Our view

We spent a lot of time cleaning the place up yesterday, and now just have a few things to hang on the walls before we will have completely put it together. I feel so much more at ease now – more so than i have in a good month or two, i’d say. Despite how lovely it is, though, the best thing about this place by far is that i’m here with the love of my life and get to share the space and my time with him.

This is a photo of one of the 111 City Lofts in downtown Des Moines. I went and looked at them last weekend and definitely fell in love…

We got our sweaters at Goodwill – i’m sorta covering his up, but it was hilariously ugly. Not sure what i’m doing with my hands there in the photo, though.

When i went home from visiting my sister i was confronted by Dan about some things, and the conversation ultimately ended in us each going promptly to facebook and changing our relationship status from “In a relationship” to “Single”. The timing of it forced me to hastily pack a bag and return to Des Moines, find and sign a lease the following morning, and sneak back to Ames periodically to pack shit while Dan was out of the apartment. It’s still my apartment, of course, and i’m welcome there, only if the other resident happens to be around i’m greeted by cold silence the back of his head. Understandably.

So, one week, three trips to Ames and one overpriced Uhaul later i’ve got all of my stuff in my new apartment finally. I had thought that, having lived with a roommate in a small one-bedroom apartment and lost virtually everything that wasn’t in it, i didn’t have that much stuff left. My furniture filled a fourteen-foot truck and the rest took two carloads though, amazingly. Let me tell ya, walking fifty yards between the car and the front door over and over again in the middle of summer can make a person want to burn what’s left of her worldly possessions. Next time i’m hiring a moving crew, i don’t care how much it costs.

I owe a huge thank-you to Mike and Dan Falk, and of course to my Mama who not only helped me schlep my stuff around but has also provided companionship and food, and will most likely continue to do so. Maybe it’s just the fact that there are still boxes all over the place, but i really haven’t found the motivation to cook any sort of meal just for myself in this place yet. I don’t even have butter. And i don’t care.

I’m in the bottom right one there. The other buildings have cute landscaping around them, but not this one.

The new place is a two-bedroom, bigger than i need but with no dishwasher or garbage disposal or working air conditioner. There’s a constantly-crying baby next door and the laundry facility is in the basement of the next building. It has its drawbacks. I’ll post photos of the interior when i’ve put all this stuff away. I haven’t even found a bike rack yet, so my bicycle is taking up a big awkward chunk of my living room. The cable and internet will be hooked up tomorrow, and i think it will be a much more comfortable place with those distractions readily available. I’m thinking of getting a futon for the extra bedroom, so if you’re ever in Des Moines and need a place to stay, give me a call.

My sister Amy and her son Harper are visiting from Oregon right now. They arrived on Wednesday and the three of us and Mom had fun shopping around the East Village of Des Moines, going to see WALL-E, reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and generally hanging out. Friday evening Uncle Doug and Aunt Vicki had a little BBQ to celebrate, and of course their whole branch of the family was there. Saturday we drove out to Uncle Dave’s and visited with that bunch and Harper had fun playing with his second cousins. It had been a couple years since most of us had seen each other, and it was nice to be able to catch up.

That evening Mom, Amy and I went to see Ani DiFranco at The Capitol Theater in Davenport. I never cease to be amazed by how much she rocks. She was a little less talkative than the last time i saw her over in Iowa City with Emily last summer, but that’s okay.

I wish i’d taken pictures of all this stuff. Next time.

Yesterday Amy & Harps headed for Cedar Rapids and Mom & I came back to DM. On our way we stopped at the Amana colonies for lunch and picked up some blueberry wine. I hadn’t been around there in quite a few years. It’s really well-maintained and cute, but it was so hot that we didn’t stick around for long.

I saw some paintings by this Chicago artist Laura Lee Junge in a little gallery there, and i thought they were really neat:

On an unrelated note, my current goal in life is to decide on an apartment to move to in Des Moines, which is proving to be a major headache. But i got my new camera phone today, so playing with that should relieve some stress for sure.

Iowa has been flooding this summer, as i’m sure you’re all well aware. I blogged about the floods in ames, after that happened Des Moines also flooded, and just after that Cedar Rapids and Iowa City took it in the shorts big time. As it turns out, the storage unit that my mother and i had a lot of our worldly possessions stored in was overtaken by about 2.5′ of water, and we didn’t have the means to deal with the aftermath until this weekend.

Mom lost all of her furniture except for a desk we acquired at a garage sale at some point for $5. I lost whatever nostalgia i had stored in there except for my stupid fucking beanie baby collection, one other box of toys and some lightweight box i didn’t bother to open.

I had figured that my old journals were destroyed, and i discovered they were. I’ve been keeping a journal for ten years now, and the earlier half of them is gone. My high school letter was in there, no big deal. And my portfolio. That portfolio had probably eight years or so of artwork in it. My charcoal self-portrait. The sunflower i hated but mom loved. The conte and oil pastel drawings i did in my last drawing class. The graphite drawing of a rose. I don’t even know how many other pieces. I never found my old sketchbooks or the three-dimensional artwork, and so those are probably in there somewhere, too.

This is the self-portrait in charcoal, which is destroyed now.

I cried when i saw the portfolio. I discovered that my drawings are worth more to me than my writings. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but i think the two are incomparable. The journals were mostly full of drivel i’d written about boys i ought to have forgotten by now anyway. Which reminds me, the statue i was given as a gift once upon a time was destroyed as well. Sadly, though, i suppose that’s only fitting.

I’m grateful for what i still have: my more recent journals, all of my photo albums, all of my black-and-white photo negatives and prints. My poetry is all preserved on my computer. I have the people i love and my own life, and that’s actually worth more than everything i’ve ever created or ever will create. As an artist you imagine that the things you create might live beyond you, but i’ve never done anything of that importance anyway.

Here are a few of my favorites, or at least the ones from whom i was able to snatch a business card with a web address.

KEITH GRACE – This one appealed to the graphic designer in me because of the bright colors, simple images and the use of typography as texture. Fun collage/paintings, just really cool to look at.

CHRIS HONEYSETT – Obviously a great black & white photographer. Who doesn’t love fog photos?

BRUCE HOLWERDA – These paintings are just so whimsical and colorful and beautiful. I love that he captures the magic of dance and uses techniques like splatter painting and collage-like color so that the image almost seems to glitter.

So check out their websites, buy me a print or two… And come with us next year. We’ll get a four-dollar beer and gripe about all the other gawkers.