the fairy queen

I'm still getting used to sleeping with the windows open, so I've been waking up early and going back to bed. Whoever said that you can't remember more than three of your dreams is lying, because I remembered four in one night, or morning, as the case may be. One of them was unremarkable and kind of normal. In one of them, I took my chances in this puzzle room because I had thirty minutes to kill; the first puzzle involved finding an out of place object on some shelves, the second involved converting titles to numbers, if that makes sense to you, which it obviously doesn't because of dream logic, and the third I didn't see because I woke up. One of them I was discussing the taxonomy of dude rock vs cock rock in an elevator that could move from side to side as well as up and down. The fourth, I was in some park, watching a deconstructed version of King Roger without the orchestra or percussion and it transformed into a deconstructed version of Turandot with the music played on an old-fashioned sound system.

My friend couldn't make it to the MFA yesterday and I declined to invite Emma in her stead because there was no way she could get my message in time to work out scheduling.

The first thing the automated announcements said as systems went online is "Davis Square" and Addie's like "That is not where we are." and then went back to her conversation with Monica about someone's furry art. I knew a Monica but unless she never aged, she's probably not the same person. Also, she'd be poking through their safety equipment and admonishing the lack of a tourniquet because a light could fall down on someone or a door could suddenly explode. Monica's a common name, unlike Amaris. It's funny, I know someone who's Asian and named Amaris who not only does not live in Massachusetts but I'm pretty sure she's never been to Massachusetts. Also, if you ever meet someone named Monica, don't bring up Mambo #5.

There were four artists, either disabled or homeless (or both, because sometimes it's interconnected) showcasing their work for an organization called ArtLifting. All of the works are inspired by Megacities Asia and all depict Boston. None of them imagined that their works would be at the MFA.

I'm sorry I can't find any decent pictures so I'm just going to have to describe them to you.

Elizabeth Belstraz made a collage of a map of Boston and its satellites clouded and broken and rearranged, vapor trails and cellphone signals in the sky. It's about how we're brought together but kept apart by the same thing. And I can't bring up how we're isolated by something meant to bring us together and how hard it is to find photographs from yesterday without bringing up Facebook. Yay, crackpot Infowars can go viral unfettered. Except I don't need or want links to crackpot Infowars and Breitbart articles going viral unfettered, I want a proper search feature again. Also, I need to find an alternative to Iconosquare.

She was away for a few minutes so the woman who explained the work to me had this Emerson quote on a pendant: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." She had a ring engraved with something but I'm not sure what that something was.

The upper class is in intact cell phone cases, the lower class is in battered cell phone cases, inside each cell phone case are cardboard faces with googly eyes and sharpied black holes for mouths, connected by bits of packing styrofoam and discarded lottery tickets, the homeless are a morass of faces and googly eyes.
In other words, downward mobility is painfully easy, upward mobility is an illusion.
The artist, Lorianne Fay, has a form of corneal dystrophy, and says she can see better with her camera than with any pair of glasses.

Allen Chamberland has COPD, despite not smoking.

From afar, they look like photographs with the contrast at maximum, but up close, you can tell they're black paper cut with the sword of exact zero. They depict places where the homeless sleep.

So what I've learned about COPD from Wikipedia is that women in Europe and the US smoke more than women in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, while men in Europe and the US smoke less than men in Asia and Africa. There are some interesting exceptions: Albanian women don't smoke. Lebanese women smoke like chimneys possibly because Lebanon is by far the most westernized country in the Middle East outside of Israel, while nobody in Ethiopia smokes. I'm not sure why; maybe because they were never colonized.
This is a long time ago and the site I was quoting is no longer around but I remember hearing that tobacco persuaded the Czech government to allow smoking in public places because "it lowers the amount of money spent on health care." A search tells me Philip Morris commissioned a report saying that smokers dying earlier and tax revenue outweighed the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses to allay the Czech health ministry.
But the Czech Republic doesn't have a particularly high smoking rate.

Kitty Zen contrasts the vivid metallics/acrylic colors in her paintings with the outside, which is gray with hints of green. She says she wants to make her world more upbeat and beautiful. She says she uses just the right amount of chaos.


Lessons From The Rock Dove, acrylic paint and metallic pigments applied with a sponge and a bristle brush. White rodos were prized, while other rodos adapted to fit in amongst the reds of brick and the gray and blue of concrete.


The painting of the Brewer Fountain is called Chaotic Muses. It's reversed and I think she said that she painted the background first because that's what she notices first when she goes to the Boston Common. The water is paint mixed with glitter.
I can't tell you anything about the flower painting.


This work, inspired by photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, was on her bag.

She didn't get a chance to see Bright Matter.
She had a crown of crystals and steel spikes and beads and pearls that she made, twin nose rings, a metal pendant, a dress of sunset-on-snow colored sequins, hair of pale silver and blue and pink, a tattooed gorget of five-pointed stars bound by chains.

David and his traveling companion/friend, who has a crescent and star ring, have the raven as their spirit animal according to some test somewhere. They're happy about being the most intelligent birds out there but kinda mixed on the idea of scavenging their food.

A guy wore a "bikes not bombs" shirt designed in homage to Shepard Fairey and old posters.

A clarinetist wishes she could hear a nyckelharpa in action and I said that you apparently could hear one in action here if you can time travel; I found a picture on Flickr and really wish I knew who these people were so I could hear them in action. At least you get plenty of erhu on the MBTA.
Her friend called one of the African instruments a magickal bottlecap clicker clicker.
Her other friend has blue hair.
All of us want to hear these instruments, or at least accurate replicas, in action.

A guy had tentacle wrist tattoos and a lumberjack t-shirt.

Like this one. I looked up lumberjack vs tree and bada climp, bada clamp, there it was.

I noticed that one of the ceramic birds is a mallard and I think there's some kind of gull there too.
A man described Chaosmos Mandala as like being inside Liberace's house.

One of the geese that hangs around outside the MFA had a baby with her.

I ran into Kathleen in the museum so she could take a picture of her portrait.

I didn't think it would be so warm when I left and I thought it would start raining again.

Someone had a chihuahua-something else mix dog named Sputnik, which is either a Russian satellite or the Russian equivalent of Info Wars, on the train and there was an empty seat in front of her so I just sat there and petted him. Someone nearby remarked about how much Government Center changed. It's very bright. More subtly, there are colorful lights just below the glass structure. It's surrounded by a mess of debris and construction.

I saw a woman with cotton candy colored braids.

There was a guy who looked like Sam of Atlas Lab sitting next to me except not balding, and a bunch of people who went to the Museum of Science and saw the tamarins sitting across from me. One had blonde and dark purple hair and a tiny wishbone pendant. One had a crescent and star pendant that I thought was a dolphin from a distance.
The actual coracoid bone is fragile and I swear every other passerine bird we get has a broken coracoid, but her wishbone pendant isn't fragile at all.

burning question: why does the anti-SJW crowd have such a consuming hatred for colored hair? Don't most of their waifus have pink/green/blue hair?