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May 14, 2001
Other Weekend Stuff
The weekend was chock-full o' activity. Friday night we went to an art show that was mildly disappointing. It was at 21 Grand, and was a benefit for the space itself. All the artwork was priced less than 50 dollars, and it was apparent that the artists involved were giving away the unfinished, second string art. I wish I had known about it in advance, as I have a ton of lithographs that I could have donated. Afterwards, we went to have some sushi at Mr. Sushi with Patrick and Kate. The food was good, and we gorged ourselves. Kate and Jenny wanted to see a film, Patrick needed to work on his hats for the show, and I decided to hang with Patrick while he worked. We drank a few beers and Patrick modified some straps on one of his hats, and we listened to some drum and bass for while, and then we changed over to Radiohead's OK Computer, which is still one of my favorite albums. Patrick doesn't seem to care for it, but I gushed about it for 45 minutes anyway. He tolerated me. Just barely. I headed home and off to bed. On Saturday Jenny and I planned to clean out our storage space in The City. I headed over a few hours early, and stopped off at my studio space for a while. It was my first visit there in many months, and I was quite productive. The space as a whole was empty -- it looks like the economic toll has taken effect on the artists in the city as well. I have about five pieces in progress, and played a little on each one. The pieces were started months back when Patrick, Dolan and I thought we might put together a joint show of our work - my paintings, Dolan's furniture, and Patrick's hats. The work is similar to my other work, with sketchy, cartoon-ish imagery, but I've left behind some of the stuff I had been drawing, and tried to incorporate some imagery of hats and furniture (keeping with the collaborative theme of the show). Jenny called me from the bridge, I cleaned up and met her at the storage space. We had a tremendous amount of stuff in the space, most, if not all, was stuff we would never need again. So we began planning our garage sale for next Saturday. We took the stuff home, unloaded it, and began filing, sifting and tossing what we encountered. We loaded up the truck again, and headed off to the recycling yard and dump, deposited various things at each. While we were unloading cardboard boxes at the recycling yard we encountered a woman who was tossing newspaper and other items. She peeked in the back of the truck and asked if we were throwing the stuff away. We confirmed this, and she began asking if she could have the stuff. Now, mind you, most of this stuff was incredible crap - dry rotted lumber, a warped and peeling chair. She said she'd love to take it, and did. As we were driving away I mentioned to Jenny how glad I was that the woman wasn't our neighbor. I can only imagine what her backyard looks like. My mother is the same way, she'll take anything, and stack it, use it, file it, burn it - whatever she can do. She goes to every garage sale she sees, buys anything even remotely interesting to her, and packs her station waon to the top. He house is going to be a bitch to clean out when she ge's older or moves away. Anyway, after that we went home and cleaned the house. In only a week our house had gotten pretty messy, and we need to clean up for a few friends coming over. It was Kolin's birthday, and we were going out to dinner and thought it would be nice to have folks over for pre-dinner drinks. Jenny made mojitos, and we all were entertained by the dog. We went to dinner at Baywolf, and while the food was good, I was a bit disappointed by the portions, service and price. I think that the Bay Area suffers from some residuals of the new economy. We are paying a lot of money for food that isn't quite imaginative enough for the price. I take back the part about service - the service was actually pretty good for Berkeley. I'm usually pretty bitter about service, and the guy was pretty good - even engaging us in conversation about Benicio del Toro. We headed home, sleepy, and headed off to bed again. On Sunday, we headed down to Jenny's parents house to make her mom a Mother's Day Brunch. We made the exact same food that we had at the shower the weekend before, capitalizing on the leftovers and the recent, fresh-in-our head assembly and recipe instructions. The food was good, and everyone was very satisfied at the end of lunch. We headed back up the Peninsula. I was feeling pretty mentally exhausted by this time, and started to pretty much shut down. This makes Jenny nervous, she thinks I might be angry or sad, but I pretty much had exhausted my weekly supply of social energy and needed some downtime. Jenny provided me some latitude, and I took a brief nap, read a few shorts from the new McSweeny's (the Zadie Smith is soooo good), watched the Soprano's and ate an English Muffin with peanut butter. We prepared ourselves and headed back across the bridge to Cafe Cocomo (see below) and ran into tons of people we knew. I was grateful for the nap, and my social energy was renewed a bit and we had a good time. I ran into Monte and Jamie, and saw Elise for the first time in months/years. I finally introduced her to Jenny and they chatted away. We also saw Daria and Dolan, as well as a host of the rest of Jenny's group of friends. We stayed a bit ate, had a post performance beer and headed back across the bay listening to Radiohead's Amnesiac, got home and headed off, once again, to bed.
Posted by tdotjay at May 14, 2001 8:20 AM
