Do or Diorama!!!!!

I'd like to cordially invite you to my home for a celebration of miniature 3-D worlds and also to celebrate my 28th birthday on FRI. NOV. 7th!! 8 P.M.


Please make a diorama and bring it!!

The suggested theme for the diorama's is NATURAL DISASTERS!

Volcanoes!
Tsunamis!
Hurricanes!
Heartbreaks!
Floods!

This theme is not required but it WOULD be pretty fucking cool.

As you may already know,
the life sized dude ranch diorama home is at:
5200 NE 35th Ave
Portland, OR 97211

Bring a diorama, a friend, some wine and whatever magical things you would like me to have for being 28. (those possibilities are endless!!!) oh and your dancing shoes.


FRI. NOV.
7th 8 pm
Do or Diorama

Menage-a-trois

Cole Robinson, Dan Bayer, and Peter Kass are all becoming one year older this week. In celebration, we're having a three way birthday party on Monday, the 13th at 7pm.

The theme is Menage-a-trois meaning we're doing everything in threes that night. Bring two dates and dress as triplets.

We'll also be having a treasure hunt in teams of three, a 3 lap bike race, and a 3
legged race. If you come alone, no problem. Hook up with others coming stag.

We'll start with a potluck at 7pm.

How David Wins

Remember that time during the summer when David was moping around feeling unproductive and Dan challenged him to complete a do-or-die art project: design 50 posters and put them up around Alberta before the end of the week or Dan would handcuff him to a bike rack downtown with a sign reading "Justice to Bike Thieves"?

David accomplished the task in a hilariously characteristic way. Half of the posters were white sheets of paper stapled to light poles with 50 staples in straight rows. No drawn images, no text, just staples on white paper. Thanks, David.

Then David flew back to Chicago and in his absence the posters have changed in a way no one saw coming. The staples have rusted in the Portland rain and now long brown streaks emanate from each mark. They look beautiful and old and draw attention to the deep brown of the light poles.

The sign on 33rd and Alberta attracted a tagger:



We noticed how the posters had changed while walking to New Seasons one afternoon. "Damn it," said Dan, admiring the rust, "David wins again!"

I Made a Comic

with my friend Arthur and I'm putting it up here for you.



click to see it big.

love,
s.mirk

And More Beautiful People

I woke up Sunday morning to the cherubic-notes of classical harp music tinkling in my bedroom door. I stumbled into the living room to find Emily, a former circus performer turned harpist, perched on the edge of our sofa plucking away at a full size harp. Later she filled our kitchen with buckets of flowers and baked cookies.



Sleeping one sofa over, meanwhile, is Meredith - my great friend from school and Nate's newest miracle healer. She's taken to walking around the neighborhood finding edible plants. Sunday night she returned home after a sunset stroll to the Kennedy School with this ridiculous fall bounty: a dozen apples and an absurdly-shaped squash.



Hooray for couchsurfers paying rent in kindness!

posted by s.mirk

NO MOVIE NIGHT THIS WEEK!

INSTEAD!!!!!!!!!!!! COME to SPEED SUIT'S FIRST EVER PERFORMANCE!
Dan and I have put our lives into it so fucking show up at least....
it's gonna be the dance party that makes everyone sweaty and better friends then they were before the show started.
sarah's gonna be there.
cole is gonna be there.
welcome back jill, she's gonna be there.

better words than scrabulous and safety instructions combined.
it all happens at lindsey's house!

22nd and Alberta.
4826 NE 22nd ave.
to be exact.
the house where shit is happening.
maybe 10:00
i hope. not sure yet.
but call me and ill tell you.
541-633-5712...

When Laundry is a Newsworthy Event

Here's a quick fact about Nate:

Despite living at our house for 3 months, he had only gone to the laundromat once. UNTIL YESTERDAY! Yes, Sunday was the essential but rare event: laundry day! Everyone hates laundry day! The machines at Alberta Wash House cost $1.75 and scrounging up 7 quarters would be a pain even if the machines didn't occassionally lash out in random acts of disrespect, leaving your clothes soggy or covered with new mysterious stains.

But anyway, laundry day! We piled up Dan's bike trailer with our small mountain of dirty clothes. Please note our hilarious last-clean-item laundry day outfits. Dan dressed in Halloween garb, Nate wore that blue sweater and I'm all fancy in a black dress.



collective laundry costs for month of September: $10.25

Gettin' Creamed

This week we all learned some important lessons.

Number one important lesson: Cream cheese makes anything taste better! Even chocolate chip cookies!





Our refrigerator is now occupied by exclusively cream cheese, someone’s forgotten case of PBR and – honest to god – 15 pounds of carrots. Cole and Nate juice carrots like nutritional fiends, they tear through a 5-pound bag in a day or two. The juicer runs nightly and everywhere around the house are glass jars lined with the unmistakable orange crust of once-wonderful liquid carrot.

Also, look what happens when you try to take Nate to a “high art” event at the TBA Festival! All he wants to look at are the penis clouds! :



And listen to what happens when I take myself to an art event and then decide to interview everyone present: I get so excited by asking questions that I forget to breathe between words.

A Trip to the Fair

Sometimes working as a reporter means I get paid to do things I don't want to do. Like distribute condoms at the state fair.

Our new friend Arthur and I drove down to Salem Sunday evening to do just this. The fair's slogan is "Too big to miss!" so I didn't print off directions. This slogan proved to be sadly misleading. On the outskirts of the wrong side of Salem, we finally stopped at a 24 hours donut store to ask where to go. The kid working the counter made some vague gestures toward the appropriate street and then told us, placing two rainbow-sprinkle donut holes in a bag, "Everyone's saying there was a fight at the fair yesterday."

My expectations increased dramatically.

The state fair turned out to be full of surprises. Number one surprise: sunset makes the gaudy flashes of the food booths beautiful.



Only at the state fair can you watch a video of a horse giving birth in such convenient proximity to Oregon's largest potato.



We held yellow, nearly weightless baby chicks in pen morbidly sponsored by the Oregon Chicken Fryers Association. We met a beekeeper and watched the queen bee lay an egg.
We took a long time surveying the winners of the decorated cakes category while making up our minds on which one to cast our own votes for.

(can you guess which one of these was my choice?)








Oregon: famous for its edible beavers.


posted by s.mirk

David's Exit Video

Well, today I left Portland and the beloved Dude Ranch, but not before making my awesome exit video for the Portland Mercury's My Pretty Portland 2-minute video competition! I'm also sort of considering it a goodbye-to-Portland video since my classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago start tomorrow and I will most likely be here in the midwest at least until winter break. Which will be awesome! I've only been here a few hours so far but Chicago is much as I remember: a cat that juggles shoes, tent set up in the living room, etc.

So-long Dude Ranch friends, enjoy the movie.



D. Cook

Cake and Parents

Oh man, what a weekend. Let me tell you about it.

Cole went camping. He was gone all weekend.
Dan ate all my cereal while watching Beastmaster by himself on the sofa, then went camping. He was gone all weekend.
Nate wished the sun would stop shining, then went in the basement and made music on the computer all weekend.

Thus David and I were forced to have a good time all by ourselves! It was pretty tough but we totally did it. Mostly, we went to the zine symposium downtown, where we met some great people (like this girl who does comics like mine but better and in San Francisco!) and drank some coffee.

Then David's parents came to visit! They all made hats together at Tuey's monthly cake party. Apparently David's parents secretly know how to make hats really well, because his dad turned a strip of blue construction paper into a wearable Frank Gehry building and his mom made an Easter bonnet so pretty that someone else picked it up and wore it home.



This is Tuey cutting the cake, which turned 5 this month. David celebrated the year's fifth cake party by forming himself into a five on the grass of Lair Hill Park.





posted by s.mirk

House Half Empty

For the first time I can remember, no one is sleeping in our backyard. No one is sleeping on our living room sofas. The trampoline is vacant. It's Thursday morning and absolutely no one is crashing at our house.

While steaming chard for breakfast, Cole and I counted up the number of people who have stayed at our house this summer.

29 people have crashed here for one night or more (not including romantic liaisons, we're talking sofa people), including Nate and Jill who were eventually brought into the rent-paying fold and David who washed our dishes all summer in compensation for his basement room.

Sometimes people ask me how many people I live with and I don't know what to tell them. Now, though, I can confidently say that in a battle of couch surfers versus housemates we would be outnumbered one to seven.

But right now, no one is here but us housemates. Does that mean summer is over or something? Do travelers scatter as soon as the rain comes?

posted by s.mirk

Birthday!

Man, it's almost my birthday. That means I'm almost 22 and I haven't done anything yet but graduate from college and make some good friends and write some stuff. I remember watching the Olympics when I was 13 -- the same age as most of the tiny sequined gymnasts -- and thinking, "Wow! I could have done THAT by now?!"

I still haven't done THAT but, you know, I've been having a good time. So let's continue this 22 year-long unproductive streak and waste another night together, okay?

Wednesday Night 08.20.2008
8PM

Party starts at the Dude Ranch, then goes and goes. These images are clues as to what we'll be doing:





Bring your bike.

posted by s.mirk

DUDE RANCH Summer Movie Night: Week Six : Pre-Film Creative

A Digital Potluck is an event where everyone arrives with a digital recording device and participates in a record keeping activity. This week the record keeping activity will be the creation of 3D animations of flying objects. Please bring your digital camera and find out how this is accomplished.

Nate's True Poem about the suburbs

When Driving on Highway 26,
Exit 69 is for Beaverton!
What are the Odds!