kidchamp dot net

01.23.08

twelve things, concluded:

09 if i had $109.99 to spare and could remember what happened to the mix tapes i made and received for my car* in san francisco, i'd be all about buying the plusdeck 2c, a PC gadget that rips digital files from cassettes. who doesn't want a digital version of their high school boyfriend's courtship mixes, even if they were a little heavy on chicago and metallica (cough)?

10 if you haven't yet seen jim of sweet juniper's photos of the detroit public schools book depository / roosevelt warehouse (his blog post about it is here), take a stroll through the set - it's breathtaking. in short, the warehouse is a giant, derelict building where school supplies (including textbooks still in their packaging) were left in heaps to burn, rot, and generally become decrepit over the course of decades. the space is weirdly futuristic, and jim's shots of trees growing in the remains of burned books have to be seen to be believed. it's a shame that he's been forced to restrict viewing options on his flickr photos - i'd love to be able to crawl around in giant versions of them.

11 some people are mature enough to look at things like the cover of do me: sex tales from tin house** without flushing or fleeing. prude that i am, i am not one of those people - which is a bit of a problem, as the book piqued my interest to the point where i want to request a review copy. smut isn't very satisfying as a general proposition, and Serious Writers handle sex about as successfully as pornsters handle literary fiction, at least in my experience. do the do me authors, like the guy who taught my college fiction class, limit themselves to images of baked goods? could the title, as paul and i both theorized, be a reference to bell biv devoe? if an imagery betting pool ever comes together - and i sincerely hope one does - my $5 is on baked goods. predictions, anyone else?

12 subversive handcraft, a guest blog post from kathreen of whipup (a kick-ass tutorial site), makes me so happy: cross stitching on public train seats! embroidered yeti! chalk dust rugs! sweet jesus i love craft!

*though i was offered a free upgrade to a cd player, i refused to part with the tape deck that came standard on my '00 VW golf (the greatest car ever, incidentally); i thought that choosing to sit through entire cassettes instead of flipping through tracks demonstrated strength of character or something. i also developed a habit of leaving the radio on 'scan' and listening to stations in 15-second snippets; i'm a masochistic listener.

**a well-known portland literary magazine. has its own martini.