Cow poetry

I hadn't heard of this, but it was posted on one of the listservs I'm on. Apparently, a few years ago, a performance art piece was constructed to have cows create poetry.

Banks, a 22-year-old student at Purchase College, painted single words (from "a" to "existential") on the flanks of about 60 cows near his upstate New York home, then let them wander around to see if they could compose poetry. So Holsteins and Jerseys named Elsie and Maggie came up with phrases like "eccentric art," "performance as cow environment" and Banks' own favorite, "organic conceptual art as poetry." One animal seemed especially inspired -- with "away" written on her side, she broke loose from the herd for a while.

There's something about this that struck me as very amusing.

New garden statuary

While on vacation on the Eastern shore of Maryland, Q & I got new garden statuary, which was delivered yesterday. This statue/birdbath is in our front garden, and holds the remnants of last night's rain. She looks beautiful, peaceful, and sad.

Sparkly sparkly sparkly

I have been working (on and off) for some months now on a beaded necklace for my friend and dance teacher/mentor, Artemis. She is a fiery Turkish-style dancer, and she comes alive in red, so I hunted up all of my red beads, bought more (and more), and hand-beaded a necklace for her. It's finally finished! I can't wait to give it to her when I see her on Friday.

I started with a base of Timtex (stiff stabilizer) and covered it with stretch velvet. Then I sewed on Swarovski crystals in a random pattern and sewed on delicas (tiny beads) around each one. The fringe is silverlined ruby glass beads, Swarovski crystal bicones, and Czech glass butterflies (red with an AB coating), tipped with gold Swarovski crystals. Then I sewed two beaded strands with these same types of beads to link the necklace in the back. Finally, a lining was sewed on the inside, to cover all the stitching.

[Later thought] Oh, and I'd welcome any suggestions for a name/title for this piece -- I'm at a loss at the moment.

[Still later] I've named it "Turkish Fire" -- thanks for all the suggestions!