Loose Leaf Notes

1. My brothers had these cardboard brick blocks when we were growing up.  I got them for my sons and now for my grandsons because they provide endless open ended fun. In just one hour Bryce and Liam built a Five Nights at Freddie’s Pizza Parlor, a race track, robots and even a keyboard and computer.

2. A Facebook friend was recently posting pictures of her beautiful new yurt, to which I commented “yurt so good!”

3. I write to synthesize what I’m learning at the time, my bogger’s bio reads, and I look at this 13 Thursday, which I’ve been doing weekly since 2005, as a way to synthesize the week and create a virtual journal/writer’s filing cabinet.

4. I get so bored at board meetings. 

5. It’s too bad that the word invalid (in-va-lid) is the same as invalid (in-valid).

6. “I find it a source of humor that conservatives are such flag waving fans of the founding fathers and the Constitution, when their political counterparts of the time were totally Tory, supporting the established order and divine rights of King George, not the progressives who fought for and created this radical experiment with democracy.” – My Dharmacratic friend Will

7. Whether it’s performance art, live music, theater or visual art, Floydfest has always been a canvas for creativity.  Everything from the costumes worn to landscaped pools and gardens, and to the vending of fine art and handcrafted wares are examples of Floydfest’s focus on the arts. – More from my story that first appeared in The Floyd Press is HERE.

8. I can’t take my eyes of THIS even though it kind of freaks me out.

9. My Asheville potter son, Josh Copus, gets a kick out of bricks and is a self-confessed brick geek. He collects found bricks, recycles old bricks, makes his own bricks, and builds wood fire kilns with bricks. “Nothing would have happened without bricks,” he said during his 2007 BFA thesis show that was named Building Community and revolved around a found clay pipe (power), a clay vessel (food) and a brick (shelter), and a 12 foot tall and 20 foot wide brick wall that demonstrated the strength of a collective by the word INDIVIDUAL stamped on each separate brick. In another brick installation, the bricks were stamped with the word COMMUNITY and were free for the arranging or taking.

10. Recently, while doing an art residency at Watershed Ceramics in Maine (a place with a history as a brick factory), Josh rekindled his BFA Building Community show with “The COMMUNITY brand pop-up brick company” in which he takes orders and sends out by mail “a limited edition, small batch, single source, commemorative, living wage certified, 100% organic, made in Maine, artisan brick.”   He writes on his blog, “8 years ago I sent a brick through the Post Office to Mary Baringer, and she said they still talk about it her small New England village.  So I figured we would give them something to talk about for the next 8 years.”  You can follow Josh’s art adventures HERE.

11. You can view his mail art HERE and see the postman who said, “He can mail a sock if he wants to when another postal worker was confused about the mailing brick HERE.

12. It was Josh that turned me on to the anonymous British street artist Bansky a few years ago, and I love his work.  Yesterday I read that Bansky just opened a pop-up dystopian theme park called Dismaland, a bemusement park/dark take-off on Disneyland that you have to SEE to believe.

13. If that last link gave you a little anxiety, try THIS for a few moments, and you should feel better.

________Thirteen Thursday