the sky was an odd smokey blue color (i believe crayola used to call it "cadet blue") and made the factory district look very red as i drove over the bypass this afternoon. they're not factories anymore...not most of them. i've often thought about renting a studio space in a certain warehouse with a tall brick tower, but if i worked there i'd have to live there...studio space isn't cheap, i guess. sometimes it looks like it might be fun to wander around the burned-out factories and the warehouses under the bypass. so i did it once and, believe it or not, it was something less than thrilling. i'm not sure what i'd expected. that was years ago, and what i recall of it now reminds me of "sunflower sutra" which, in turn, reminds me of a seemingly-sweet boy from leeds who turned out to be quite unpleasant. or i could look on the bright side and have it remind me of someone genuinely lovely. either way, the factories aren't all that interesting and my copy of sunflower sutra is gone for good...somewhere in leeds, probably shoved under a dirty ashtray and forgotten. i had a good giggle over caleb ben's al caplum joke. i don't know why, but something about plums strikes me as silly. maybe it's the fact that my dear grandmother once got confused to the brink of laughing tears trying to play "clue." or it's the memory of being drunk off wine in the afternoon, sitting on a park bench in nice with aimee, giggling and feeding plums and brie to an ugly mob of moulting pigeons. or it could be ezra pound. and if it's ezra pound, it might as well be a boy i used to know who once described a bottle of gatorade in his refrigerator as "so sweet and so cold." gatorade is certainly funny. tonight i enjoyed my tea and the company of a nice boy named matthew, and we talked about sacré coeur and vonnegut and easy cheese, and a strange man at the corner table yelled something to matthew in a language i didn't understand, then walked by and dropped a folded napkin in front of him and said "enjoy. is for free." i giggled, thinking that was a funny thing to say when handing out one's phone number. but it was a napkin full of marijuana instead, and i gasped and matthew giggled and stuck it in his bag, and we talked for a bit about amsterdam, and when i think of amsterdam i think of my poor lost sketchbook and a pub called the blarney stone. and of quentin tarantino and the hotel tamara and acrobats. leslie and i had something of a tournament tonight...taking turns balancing on a giant red "exercise ball" and timing each other on a little silver watch. there wasn't a lot of space and it was quite dangerous, really. no blood was shed, but the contest ended with me standing on a chair with a mouthful of screws, trying to reattach a curtain rod to the crumbly plaster wall. old houses like that...you're really not supposed to put screws in the plaster. but someone renovated and took out the crown moulding...anyway, i'm not exactly bob vila and we ended up sticking the bracket to the wall with masking tape. pretty shoddy work. and so. it sounds like chicago was a good time. the art institute is nice. the last time i was there, i saw some installations by bill viola. raining and burning and owls and televisions and a birthday party. and we had thai and wandered into a church and ran through a sprinkler, and it was supposed to be a field trip but mostly it was just walking and looking at frank lloyd wright coffee mugs and smoking cigarettes. well that's quite enough. love kirsten Care2 make the world greener! http://www.care2.com - Get your Free e-mail account that helps save Wildlife! +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+