The BP oil spill fiasco seems to have fallen off our radar a bit, though the disaster is far from over.  Will tells me spills of that magnitude have happened before on other, not so affluent off-shore eco-systems.  Our Earth seems to have handled it; indeed if the last one was in the seventies, we ought to know if it hadn’t.

I can’t imagine seeing in the past those sickening images of pelicans and dolphins covered in oil, and having to see them again thirty years later.  Those images are forever burned in my memory, and I imagine in yours too. I toyed with the idea of doing a Van Gogh My Pet series of oil slicked creatures, but I have never enjoyed portraying sadness and despair. It’s hard to imagine that our world would recover, and it’s rather sickening to me how little we hear about the continued fallout.  I (perhaps conveniently) blame the media for our short attention span.

For the past few months, I’ve been obsessed with David Bowie.  OBSESSED.  Initially it was one of his earliest albums, Hunky Dory, on continual repeat, which was replaced after an appropriate amount of time with his subsequent album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. This album is a rock and roll opera, which Bowie intended to form the backbone of a stage show or television production (and it still should be).

The first track, Five Years, relates the devastating news that Earth’s days are numbered.  Finitely numbered, in fact, with only five years to go.  We’ve used up all our natural resources.  Adults have given up; kids are left to plunder and ravage what’s left of the Earth.

The reality in their world seemed so hauntingly similar to our current situation, and so many other environmental situations I’ve worried and fretted about.  This oil spill debacle seemed to me so much bigger than anything else.  People close to me suggested that this spill would ruin the Southern portion of the United States, forcing a mass migration.  The oil could be displaced via hurricanes and wind up poisoning our entire water supply.  Crops could fail and even the salmon swimming happily in the Klamath River would sport a shiny black coat.  Even without employing my overactive imagination, people were (are) out of work, and animals are dying (still!).

My favorite of the album is the fourth track, Starman.  We learn of a being, “waiting in the sky; he’d like to come and meet us but he thinks he’d blow our minds.”  He knows how to help us, but is afraid we might be be unwilling to accept him or his knowledge–a valid concern.  I’ve heard so many rumors of BP executives ignoring advice; as humans, we think, we feel, and we are stubborn.

Opening our ears, the Starman tells us “not to blow it cause he knows it’s all worthwhile.” A glimmer of hope! No matter how dark our reality might be, it is still worthwhile–life is still worthwhile.  We still love, we can still laugh.

The Starman continues, “let the children lose it, let the children use it.” And it is so true; we are merely the stewards of our home.  It is our children who will inherit it when we are gone. They have the freedom to do with it what they will, just as we have the freedom to do to it what we will.  If we consider how it affects those following in our footsteps, perhaps we would take different paths.

As a Girl Scout, I have always been taught to take care of my surroundings.  When I leave a camp site, I pick up as many pieces of trash as I can find–far more, indeed than I have left there. I know that the people who are camping there next will probably destroy it again, but I can only do what I can do.  I think Starman would want it that way.

To honor this ambassador of hope I created this work:

I started with EJ DiMira’s body, which I cut out of Soap Opera Digest (quite an inspiration for me of late), added some images from Wikimedia Commons, and Photoshop flares to create his body.  I had it printed on this crazy metallic paper that adds just the faintest glimmer to finish the piece.

Will wants me to send one to David Bowie.  Julia challenged me to find his address, which ten seconds on google yielded (though I will probably only reach his publicist).

I’ve taken this as a challenge to create a triad of David Bowie inspired art, that will likely include elements from Soap Opera Digest.  Once the triad is finished, and only then, will I send them to David Bowie.  He has a habit of supporting unknown and budding artists.  I have a daydream that perhaps one day he will have to phone someone and he will pick on me.

I made these signs a couple years ago when I put on the unfortunately named First Annual Holiday Gift Bizarre in San Francisco.  It was unfortunate because we wound up only having the one.  Hindsight is always 20/20.

Please feel free to print them for use at your events.  If you laminate them, they will last forever .  I reuse mine every event, and keep them in a folder marked “Signage”.  I know just where to find them when I go to pack for Jenfest this Saturday morning.  I’ve learned a lot about design since making these, so my apologies for the rough edges.

Every year I throw myself a Jenfest.  It’s half birthday party, half theatrical event.  Ask my close friends–I spend half a year planning it.  Each year I design a ridiculous invitation; a tradition my sister started, and I have continued.  Nowadays they’re websites.  You can view them all here, or check out this year’s invite (complete with a BINGO game you can play at home!).

Jenfest is my favorite time of the year.  I love throwing events–big and small.  I love finding a theme and working my face into it and adding in as much hilarity as I can possibly muster.  Oh yes, it is quite my favorite part of the year.

I have utilized large photos of my face at multiple Jenfests. I think it's funny!

Jenfest has always been green:  I put out recycling and compost bins (with signage!), use paper plates (compostable), keep and wash plastic flatware and cups.

I was having an internal battle this year over Jenfest’s budget.  Ever since I became self-employed, I’ve had to look at the costs associated with Jenfest differently. I’ve had steady work since I was 14, often working as many as three jobs.  I am hella motivated by money.  Paying for Jenfest wasn’t ever anything I thought about, I just loved it, and looked at the associated costs as a birthday present to myself.  But over the years the price of Jenfest has steadily risen: my standards for food and beverages has gone up, I’ve exhausted the cheapest options for souvenirs, I no longer live in a large student cooperative happy to hold my parties.  Now that I have to seek out a client for each dollar I make, life is different.

I set my budget for Jenfest this year at $250 and was bound and determined to stick with it.  I was shocked with the cost for the rentals came in at $224, but I should have seen that coming.  After all, I’ve thrown enough parties and events for myself and others that I knew that rentals cost waaaay more than that.  Blissful ignorance, I suppose.  All of a sudden I couldn’t afford the decorations I had planned: the full color JENGO playing cards, the sparkly (and reusable) Jenfest banner, the Jenfest ribbons to mark the prizes.  I was stranded in the land of indecision, until I met my friend Rosalie for coffee yesterday.

I was expressing my confusion about where to go from here, and she said, “I would just to Creative Reuse and find some fabric there and paint on it.”  The light went off in my head.  I was already planning on finding the prizes from thrift stores and friends’ garages.  But what if I recycled (or upcycled, depending…) all of the Jenfest materials and decorations?  What would that look like?

I wasn’t sure, but a trip to the Center for Creative Reuse (a wonderful resource if you live in the Bay Area!) pointed me down the yellow brick road towards an awesome, even greener Jenfest.  Mardi Gras beads at 15 cents each; shiny plastic paper at 5 cents each.  Fabric at 75 cents a yard.  Tie silk I had bought years ago for a fraction of an Andrew Jackson.  Used golf balls for the Jengo balls. Reused cardstock for hand-made JENGO playing cards.

I spent a total of $22 and wound up with all the materials I could possibly need to deck out Jenfest 2010, a couple ancient history text books for Will and some cool envelopes I can use for Van Gogh My Pet.

I’ll let you know how it goes, and I would love to see you there!  All are invited to Jenfest this Saturday.  Full details.

Last January, I concocted a plan. My great friend John was starting up his theatre company, Hella Fresh Theatre. I was in the process of designing his website for him, which features a penguin very prominently. I decided that John absolutely needed an actual penguin mascot to be present for the first performance.

I had a few cubic feet of roving wool I had picked up while working as a Super Sponge Saleswoman and a needle felting tool. Now, for those of you who have never needle felted (and really, why would you?), it is a slow and laborious process. You use a needle felting tool (which consists of a few barbed needles) and you poke a puff of wool many, many, many hundreds and hundreds of times to sculpt that which you’ve decided to sculpt.

I had decided to sculpt a penguin. For months I took it everywhere. Board meetings, birthday parties, bars…

Here I am hard at work at Galina's birthday party in the park.

When he was finally finished, I was so proud. I named him Penguino. I loved every bit of him from the little bits of color on the bottom of his penguin feet to his beady black eyes with a speckle of light. I was also, however, disappointed. He must have taken hundreds of my hours, but it wasn’t the emptiness that comes with completing such a huge project. No, I was disappointed because I felt like he would never stand out at the opening night for Hella Fresh Theatre.

My felted penguin turned out to be hardly bigger than a picture frame!

I needed a bigger penguin. I had two days to go before opening night. I asked Jordan–my intern at the time–whether he thought we could build a bigger penguin in two days. He did. I asked my friend Irene who also likes to make things and she suggested that we start with a chicken wire base and coat it in duct tape and then paper mache. We planned to then spray paint him black and white. And so we began…

We began with a roll of chicken wire.	Gave it a base by cutting darts and folding it over and wrapping the wires around each other.
We discovered early on that our work gloves did little to keep the stray wires from our fingers.	And we have created a giant pear! Just what we wanted…
Every good pear needs a beak.	And a head, of course.
For the feet we stuffed chicken wire with newspaper and added our best attempt at ridges with more chicken wire and duct tape.	Adding some wings and duct taping him together– he almost looks like he will fly away! (of course penguins don’t fly…)
The sun was setting. It’s hard to convey in photos the stress we were under. It was like Project Runway, and I could hear Tim Gunn in the background saying, "Make it work!"	We had another twenty four hours before the show and a penguin skeleton.
We managed to coat him entirely in duct tape.	We renamed my felt penguin Penguincito and bestowed the name of Penguino to our new, large enough penguin.
Good morning Penguino!	With under ten hours to go we did the remainder of our shopping.
We bought him a bow tie!	During the course of the previous evening we decided it would be easier to coat Penguino in fabric rather than spray paint him.
We quickly discovered that it wasn’t, even with the help of spray adhesive. No, it was much harder.	But we persevered.
And made quite a mess of my living room.	The clock was ticking…we switched to my hot glue gun.
Jordan handles his stress quite well.	Penguino and I had bonded a lot over the course of the past twenty four hours.
With minutes to go, Penguino is looking like a penguin!	A happy family!
If you ever see Penguino on Bart, say hi!	Oh Penguino, we made it. As we sit on BART, I’m icing my many hot glue gun burns. I think it took me a week to recover.

The happiness on John's face made it all worthwhile.

Penguino stayed for awhile with John and Hella Fresh Theatre–attending every performance and loving it. I held on to Penguincito on this side of the bay. But when John and Hella Fresh Theatre picked up and moved from San Francisco to Philadelphia, John and I had a heart to heart and decided to exchange custody of Penguino and Penguincito.

Penguincito and I went over to John’s house for one of our final get-togethers before he and his girlfriend and my great friend Yael moved away. It was a somber occasion, and I miss Penguincito dearly, but Jordan and I were happy to be reunited with our great friend, Penguino.

Penguino seems pretty happy too.

I have been wanting to try my hand at a self-portrait.

I’m not really sure how it’s going.

I have been planning this portrait for many weeks, and when I mentioned to my boyfriend that I was going to start on it the other evening, he said, “You know, I’m not entirely on board with this self-portrait plan. You paint pets!”

He was worried, as was I, that I would be terrible at painting a person. But, I explained, that was the adventure in it! Perhaps I will be–but I have to find out!

I was not prepared, however, for the end of the evening, when I couldn’t even look at it. That’s how terrible my self-portrait was turning out. At first I was so easy to paint–I know myself well. And I had the self-portraits of Van Gogh for inspiration. What could be easier?

It wasn’t easy. I haven’t been able to pick it back up, but my parents have assured me that it’s worth finishing. I said to my mom, “Mom! I look like a cartoon!” and she said, “Well, honey, you do have some cartoon in you.”

We wandered around West Oakland. The clouds were brilliant and the photographs satisfying.

I had not edited any video since the 90s. This was such a challenge, and I must have spent about 40 hours on it. It was complicated by the fact that I have this need for perfection before I can move forward with any project, and Van Gogh My Pet was never going to be perfect until I had completed this movie.

The background music is from one of my favorite bands, The Real Tuesday Weld.