Psycho cycad

It started at Home Depot. No, it started in Hawaii, actually, when I saw a cycad the size of a barrel and became enchanted. It was the most primitive plant I had ever seen, with a prehistoric look to it. It had emitted a clusters of seeds, pink beanlike things that were just sitting there in the middle of it, so I took a handful of them, hoping to take them home and grow my own monster cycad. I left the seeds in the hotel refrigerator. Good thing, I might have been arrested for smuggling.

THEN came the Home Depot part. Amazingly, a couple of weeks ago I saw a cycad in a pot, about the size of a small pineapple. It had short thick spiky leaves and a whole lot of spiky things in the middle, about 3 inches tall. I thought it would probably die within a few weeks due to the wretched light in our house.

Almost immediately, the sucker began to grow. And grow, And GROW. These insane-looking, militant-looking frondlike things shot up out of the middle of it, at a rate of about two inches a day. They splayed all over the place and I had to keep moving the plant because it outgrew the space it was in. My cat is afraid of it and refuses to even sniff it.

I don't know what all this is leading to. I have a grapefruit tree growing in the front room (visible in the top left-hand corner of these photos) which I started growing in Hinton, Alberta, so far north that it gets dark at 3 p.m. in winter, with temperatures of minus 40 C. It began as a seed in my morning grapefruit THIRTY years ago, and today presides over the entire room. Some years it blooms modestly, with perhaps one small cluster of white flowers that drench the room with honeysuckle scent, and one year it presented me with one perfect, pea-sized grapefruit. It has gone through cycles of dying over and over again, losing most of its leaves, but then it will resurrect and put out a new branch that grows at least four or five inches a week. If you were patient enough, I think you could sit there and actually watch it grow.

I am afraid of this plant. I feel like Morticia Addams feeding that carnivorous thing she kept in the greenhouse alongside the dead-headed roses. I don't know what it eats, actually. Has anybody seen the cat?

The art of juju

Just a little bit of something I had lying around the house. No, actually I made it. This is my very first functioning juju doll. Though it's hard to see, there are "instructions" wrapped around his waist which are very explicit.

This was an experimental model with its heart outside of its body. The face, however, is completely accurate. It needed accessorizing, so this is also my very first functioning noose. These are surprisingly easy to make. I can do it in my sleep now. Use hemp or sisal or jute twine for these, not yarn. They need a bit of stiffness.

I did not photograph my dolly, but ran it through the scanner, providing weird effects, made even weirder by using photoshop filters such as posterize, saturation, lightness, etc. And darkness.

Some of these came out quite abstract, but I promise you these are the same photos. This doesn't happen often and means the photos have certain properties that are hard to explain.

Invert. Looks almost like those black velvet paintings sold at gas stations in the 1980s.

The Nijinsky of juju dolls! Note his form as he leaps through the air. Almost weightless.

Closeups, so you can see the devil's handiwork.

Be nice to me. Okay?

"You had me at hello"

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The age of miracles

A beautiful, gorgeous, luscious chunk of movie impressionism, with Fred Astaire to boot. And he's singing Gershwin! Mr. Gershwin and I took a blow today - quite a bad one - someone claimed our relationship was bogus and in fact didn't exist. One wonders, sometimes, just who is the fraud. WE know what is important, and we know what transforms a life, and it's love, George, isn't it. You knew all about it and lived it through your songs. So away with the naysayers and phony psychic prophets. They know nothing, and are jealous of our connection, no doubt. We survived the hit, we survived the attempt to discredit us and hang us out to dry. Love will win: it always does. The age of miracles hasn't passed.