Just in time for falling leaves and scarves. YES.

Flying Lotus – Kill Your Co-Workers from beeple on Vimeo.

You are welcome.

I have  my marching orders for the design internship. Mock-ups and photo archives and Adobe InDesign, oh my! (Preemptively speaking, unpaid design work is more fun than paid desk work.)

I have an entire week off, staring on Wednesday. My agenda is:

• play Uncharted 2,
• bake some brownies,
• finish a few more upcycling projects,
• photograph these last few days of sun,
• cherish my quiet time.

This, for me, is living in the most hedonistic and Utopian way.

And last, but certainly not least, I’ll be starting my last quarter as an undergraduate at the end of this month. Exciting! I’ll be taking 20th Century Architecture and Indigenous Film. Just thinking about this crossroads makes me a little weepy (and confused and scared and excited and grateful). I’ll conjure up something far more eloquent and touching once I am actually done, but it wasn’t that long ago that I had my friend Kevin editing my admissions essay and I spent a few months daydreaming about studying abroad. Life: it moves fast.

The riot grrrl movement was an important clash of third wave feminism, punk rock, DIY politics (and aesthetics), and youth culture in the early nineties. Twenty-something women wanted to play their guitars loudly and be heard; they were tired of being sidelined through patriarchal musical standards and business; they wanted to reconstruct femininity and make it tough. The isolated clusters of pissed off college educated (mostly) white women located in Washington D.C. and Olympia eventually spread into a little feminist army, resembling to consciousness raising groups of the second wave feminist movement. Loud punk music with nationwide tours combined with ‘zine distribution and mainstream press coverage to give salience to their message.

And for the first time, mainstream media took notice of these women taking music production and cultural revolution into their own hands. Soon, publicity ranged from sincere Sassy profiles to hilariously patronizing television exposes, rich with “look at how these cute girls are destroying their dresses and yelling and spitting and smearing their lipstick.” Consumption culture cast the death spell on the movement, because once riot grrrl mentality was being sold back to the suburban girls in the form of pseudo-feminist role model Courtney Love and the latest scent of Teen Spirit deodorant, the cultural movement was a joke. Maybe the movement was destined to peril with the insistence of decentralization and social democracy. Maybe we can only rage so long. Who knows.

Regardless of the inevitable death of the movement, evidence from its relevance still exists. Everything from the Spice Girls and the bubblegum “girl power” moment of the late 90s to Lady Gaga of the current moment highlight how the path for independence and feminist politics was paved by these Olympia and D.C. bands in the early to mid 90s. Riot grrrl was a true a cultural and political revolution.

That big purple part is my creating time. It’s a large chunk. It feels good, even if it has come at the expense of my Assassin’s Creed re-play.

The point of this post isn’t to brag though. I want to share the fruits of my project with you all.  Shoot me an email at radioheadluv [at] gmail dot com with your mailing address. I’ll make sure and surprise on some random day with a gift soaked in grand intentions (and maybe low in actual talent).

(If you are perplexed as to why this is transitioning into a mourning post since the movie and the video game are about to be released, get thee to Neighborhood Comic Shoppe. Buy each volume. Return when you are done. )

I am uncomfortably sad. Not because the sixth volume let me down, but because this is an end of an era.

The last six years of reading Scott Pilgrim have been monumental. The series had wild and unpredictable arcs that mirrored my own crazy years. I cycled through apartments, moved across state and country lines, fell in love a couple of times, and through all the ups and downs somehow still developed into a functional adult. The development of Scott’s character mirrors my own changes, probably because creator Bryan Lee O’Malley is the same age as I am. This may be a reach, but I feel like the maturation in art and tone and direction from O’Malley (and by extension, Scott Pilgrim) reflect the same journey of improvement and challenges that I have taken on. It’s as if we were all on this wild ride of our twenties together and we have all the missteps and bad decisions and weird lettering patterns to show for it. Now the ride is over.

I won’t even attempt to review volume 6. For one thing, it’s been reviewed all over the internet. But most importantly, I am not sure how critical I can be of the book. I will say this though – it was a lovely ending.

Of course I’ll see the movie and I’ll buy the video game. But honestly, there is nothing that means more to me than looking at my bookshelf to see my autographed and nowhere near mint condition copy of volume 1 that shows the wear that only six years of re-reads and loans and moves can make. It reminds me that there was a time when Bryan was so unknown that I ordered my copy directly from him (this makes me excited for my own future success). It reminds me of the person that got me into the series. It reminds me of all the friends that I have forced to read it.

Scott P. and I…well…we’ve been through a lot. It’s been a fun six years.

A mild, mid-70s late July day in the Pacific Northwest. The air is crisp and clean. Smiles are freely shared on the street, as these folks know these days of sunshine and shorts are numbered (and are all chasing those afternoon delights).

Zoom into our hero; a female with her headphones on. Nothing about her appearance is particularly noteworthy until a passerby sees a slight smile on her face that is angled down towards the ground. He searches her face, but can’t find any clue. It appears that she is having a happy moment with herself.

Cue:

True fact: if you don’t like Daniel Clowes, we cannot be friends.

2. Kayaking

Sure, you might look like a d-b, but it’s fun. And if you are super fancy and fashion forward you can bring a beer in a cozy to complete the amazing ensemble of fat suit life-jackets and awkward (flailing) rowing.

3. Sunshine in Seattle

It appears that we will be breaching the 80 degree mark in Seattle this week. This means that the hipsters will break out their cut off skinny pant shorts, the curmudgeons will begin smiling at fellow humans, and people will fall in love. Summer in Seattle is epic in its awesomeness.

4. Smena 8M

Once upon a time I bought this old toy lomo camera. The translated “instruction manual” is hilarious, as it is full of unhelpful and poorly constructed tips that apparently were at one point helpful in Russian. My first roll will be hilarious (if I can figure out how to actually remove the film), and I promise to post the inevitable disaster to my flickr account.

5. Jenny Peterson photography

This Seattle photographer came to my attention when I needed an injection of inspiration the most. Her work is full of humor and weirdness and awesome light. Check it out.

What have you guys been checking out?

I have an admittedly misguided pride in his success. I see his burgeoning fame through a prism of memories: I remember trying to encourage his interest in cooking while he was a server at the Courtyard Marriott in Albuquerque, I remember driving a U-Haul of our belongings from Albuquerque to Portland so he could attend culinary school, I remember quizzing him with flash cards covered in measurement conversions, I remember moving to Santa Rosa so he could move up the kitchen ranks.

(Note: this is about all I will offer publicly. The words aching to spill out are best saved for a therapists couch.)

Lucky for him, he seems to have met his match in his wife Christine. She seems to offer equal parts creativity, ambition, and drive. It is clear from concept, design, website, and a robust Facebook marketing mechanism that this is not his endeavor alone. There is an organic coherence between concept and menu, website and interior design; working in tandem has clearly worked out well for them.

For some of my oldest friends, you should also take a moment to be excited. You probably also remember him as a culinary student or a server, or maybe you encouraged us to move to Portland to follow his dream, or maybe you were even there at our wedding. And in this moment of collective pride, I gladly extended the same warmth and well-wishings to my other successful friends – the web guru in Albuquerque, the photographer in Las Cruces, the tech-whiz in Albuquerque, the teacher in Indianapolis, the instructor in Manhattan, the whip-smart SLP in Tukwila. The list goes on and on.

Before this gets too tangential or sentimental, just do me a favor and drop into P/30 if you happen to be in the North Bay area. And in the midst of a kitchen rush, with tickets stacking up and  a mob of four-tops waiting to be seated, look up to the chef and give him a polite wave for me.

Anyway, this is not a proper gift, but I figured I’d share a song with you all that should inspire the fiercest of booty-shakin’.