For someone who doesn't really connect with nature much, I deserve a pat on my back for this one, not only for the trooping through the woods all weekend--bugs and snakes about--but also for the grace with which I handled the emotional intensity of the subject matter. For those of you who haven't been following, lookbook is inspired by my deceased mother who wore all white--or, being a nudist, often wore nothing at all!--all summer in the 120-degree heat of Central California, and who believed herself to be gifted with magical powers. It conjures up until-now repressed images of the books she read me (like the Time Life Series, which had a book dedicated to fairies, witches, sorcerers, elves, etc.), her art (like that famous image of Ophelia, anything by Maxfield Parish, and plenty of sensual images of semi-naked women underwater), as well as the painful part where I spent 4-6 weeks of my childhood summers being sent to summer camp so she could  have time for herself, her work, and her lovers.  I feel like we've really out done ourselves this time. In addition to for the first time explicitly using my mother and myself as the subject matter, where as past lookbooks have largely been efforts to reclaim places and practices of my traumatic past by way of putting pretty women--and "good" women--in ugly or "bad" contexts, therefor exerting a form of control over these places/practices that I did not have as a child or young adult when my autonomy was taken from me by victimizing adults.
Being able to talk about this and to end the silence via art and expression in a safe community of women and men really helps.

We are beginning to book models, photographers, production team members, and stylists for our upcoming lookbooks, and wanted to put the shout out to any fresh faces, fresh eyes, or fresh hands who'd like to come along, particularly if you're inspired by one concept more than others. We've got: (1) AUGUST = Medical/Minimal/Structural/Industrial, shot in and around Portland, inspired by my past hospital stays and intense procedural phobias, (2) SEPTEMBER = Pioneer Chic/Western Inspired, a 3-4 day shoot with locations on the way to and in to Eastern Oregon, including ghost towns, desert landscapes, the painted hills etc., inspired by my childhood fascination with gold rushers and cowboys, (3) OCTOBER = Black Magic/Mourning Time, shot in and around Portland, inspired by my mother's collection of Victorian Mourning Wear, her stint with The Church of Satan, and her time in the voodoo haven of Louisiana voodoo culture, (4) NOVEMBER = Monochromatic, shot against colorful walls or with studio backdrops in and around Portland with everyone wearing the same colors, inspired by my inherited need to obsessively organize everything combined with the Collecting the Collectors photographic art show by Carlie Armstrong, and (5) DECEMBER = Party Time, in and around Portland, with all shots representative of some form of party, inspired by a desire to overcome my life-long aversion to parties, which stems from the nature of my childhood trauma. Sound interesting? Want to be involved? We'd love to have you in any capacity. Just email us!

Come late August we will be converting the current retreat room we built above my garage gallery/studio into a short term occupancy room for Golden Rule supporters from afar--and random style-appreciative members of the public--when they come to town. Although our goal is to some day be able to afford to turn this room into an artist residency, in the mean time we're going to give this a try. It has always been my dream to run a bed and breakfast that functions as an art gallery, so this will be a beta test on the small scale. If you or anyone you know needs a place to stay while visiting after August 2011, let us know! We are not 100% sure on the rates, except that each month's cumulative earnings must equal at least the $600 of rent it would earn if rented on a month-to-month basis. We do plan, however, to offer a 20% discount to all Golden Rule FaceBook fans for sure.

Two summers ago we began DIY construction on this previously unfinished space and the garage gallery below it. We removed the pre-existing structurally unsound loft and reinforced it to code. We sent the old fir floorboards through a planer to make them shiny and new and then used them to cover our fresh insulation. We installed skylights, new floors, and put in one sheetrocked wall below, plus a glass door, and a super shiny polished cement concrete slab. It's pretty hot, especially in the summer and when you turn the space heater on for 20 minutes. And it's pretty cold in the winter with a small leak in the rainy months, but it's pretty-pretty, and a very peaceful space upstairs and a very productive space downstairs. I wish I could afford it as my own! Regardless, collaboratively building this room is one of my hugest accomplishments in life for reasons I just now realized: as a child I was promised a garage live/work space that never materialized because the garage was occupied by my mom's hoard.

I've been out scouraging the suburban shops hunting for anything and everything white and wonderful in preparation for our July 2011 White Magic Lookbook. These fine pieces will be hanging out in the closet, waiting to hit the floor in July with the rest of their all-white cohort. In the mean time, we offer them to you here via presales and as a heads up for what to expect!

In homage to my mother whose birthday would be July 13th and who wore white and nothing but white all through the 120-degree summers, our July showcase will feature the work of Lahaina Alcantara along with a collection of furniture and fashion of the all white (and off-white, and cream, and bone, and all other variations of white) wonder. Got white? Bring it!

Last week was a tough week. A friend had more than a bit of a breakdown. I was the primary caregiver. To take care of myself in the aftermath--and to location scout for our upcoming 1990's beach-theme lookbook shoot!--I found a super affordable vacation rental at the beach. I packed my art supplies and got in the car as fast as I could. The house was tiny, and smelled a bit like urine for no reason I could easily discern. But it was nicely appointed, near the beach, with tree houses, and had good floors for painting. I moved around the furniture for more space, rolled out my paper, and turned the phone on airplane mode.

Around 2 a.m. I hit a wall with my painting and headed for the hot tub. I'd neglected to bring my bathing-suit, however. Forgoing clothes in the hot tub was an unfortunate choice. The torrential rain and roaring wind blew the door shut behind me. My keys and phone were locked inside. It was 2:30 a.m. My car was unlocked, but there were no Golden Rule clothes inside this time. I wrapped myself in a pool cover and tried the neighbors' doors. No luck. Police station? No luck. After checking all the windows and scouting for spare keys, I found a rock and broke a double-paned window to reach in for keys. Glass was everywhere, inside and out. After two hours of cleaning up, I emailed the homeowner with the news, and went to bed. In the morning I found the rock--or the brick, rather. It had wrapped itself in my scarf from the velocity of the throw. It said, appropriately, "D-E-N-S-E."

That morning I had planned to cook a nice breakfast, but glass had gotten itself all up in my food. I made the fatal mistake of heading out in a low-blood sugar freak-out. The only eatery I could find, a coffee shop, had a "be back in 30" sign in the door. It happened to be next door to a thrift shop. Three familial generations of shopping compulsions got the best of me. Once that door was opened, there was no closing it. I hit every thrift shop from Rockaway through Tillamook and made some major scores. Seriously, folks, if you love that very-mysterious-to-me thing called 90s fashion, get ready for next month! I also found the motherload of vintage rub-on letters for less than $16 like they are at Columbia Drafting, and a hilarious door mat!

The unfortunate part about all this stocking up on great inventory--my mother had really only a small selection of 1990s clothing, so we're having to fill in some gaps this month to keep with the theme--is that, little did I know, Golden Rule's bank account was getting over-drafted at every stop along the way. While I was in caregiving mode the week before I'd neglected to deposit the $240-something in checks that had been sitting on my dashboard. And then on my way out of town with a stack of cash meant for the bank, I auto-piloted my way to the 26 without remembering to stop at Wells Fargo. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fucking Wynde. It's one thing to not have money and get overdraft charges. It's an entirely different thing to have money and to think it's in the bank.

After several long conversations with Wells Fargo in Tillamook and by phone--by the way, they aren't budging in spite of the fact that this is the first overdraft situation we've had in 11 months of business, and in spite of the fact that they didn't enable the "don't let the card go through" feature on my business account when I asked them to enable it on both business and personal when the law went into effect--I gave the fuck up and drove back, location scouting along the way. The only good news is I'm really excited about shooting our next look book. That and I'm SUPER thankful to Carol and Eugene Tish of The Girabaldi House (formerly a rather ghetto Comfort Inn where I used to stay back in the grad school days when we rode The Wave to the beach) for allowing us to photograph in their pool, lobby, and newly-swanky hotel rooms! 1990s beach time here we come!

When I got back from location scouting I tried to paint some more, but the wall was still there. I royally fucked my painting several times over again, trying to repair things, only making them worse. Spilling india ink, spilling walnut ink, splattering liquid gold leaf everywhere while shaking the jar, total mess. The only good thing that came out of it was in a frantic grab for a towel, I knocked a box of sugar over onto india ink and it made loveliness happen. Because of this happy accident, I've figured out a materials challenge for another art project that I'd been struggling with. Sugar and sand plus adhesive = good stuff to come.

At 1 a.m. I received a text message from my housemate warning me that an earthquake in Japan was sending a Tsunami my way. He said I probably didn't have to worry, but I should be alert around 6 a.m. for more news. My insomnia medication knocks me out cold for 8 hours. Waking up at 6 a.m. wasn't an option. I knew I had to drive home, stay up all night and drive home in the morning, or go to sleep and wait and see if I woke up wet, dry, or dead. I thought about staying. Not so secretly, I've always wanted to die in a natural disaster. Earthquake. Volcano. Tornado. Tsunami. Airplane crash (maybe not so natural, but still). So I was feeling a little passively suicidal and thinking maybe it was meant to be. My last FaceBook update from the first day at the beach was a photo of the Tsunami Evacuation route from the vacation house with the caption, "Please let me get what I want."

I sat still for an hour or so thinking, "To die or not to die?" I was three blocks from the beach, at sea level, and the waves had been HUGE in the days past. At the very last minute I decided, "Fuck this vacation. This has been the anti-vacation. I quit. I give up. I choose life." I packed up my stuff, spot cleaned the house--I was secretly hoping the tsunami would do more damage than I'd done with my naked window breaking--and drove home. It took me 3-4 hours to get home. Everyone was evacuating at 20-30mph. All the gas stations had lines miles long. When I got home at 5 a.m. I redecorated my room, put on my Samuels by Maya Rose sleep dress, hung up my Rikki Rothenberg glitter painting, and closed the door on the world. And now I mourn.

Tomorrow--or today, rather--is the first anniversary of my mother's death. March 15th, 2010 I received a call from a high school friend letting me know my mother had been found dead in her Hanford, California home. We all thought it was suicide. Before the coroners report, at least. It was an accident, though, or at least the result of a suicide-by-installment-plan rather than suicide with intention. She drank herself to death--just trying to sleep--in a bed on the floor of her dining room. The ceiling of her bedroom had caved in years before. It feels like it happened yesterday. Or years ago. It breaks my heart now. And every day.

If you've been in Golden Rule this month you're probably wondering the same question most of our customers have been asking us, "Where'd you get all these antique hypodermic needles?" In keeping with the medical aesthetic for the month, we're stocked to the brim with beautiful (and highly collectible) medical/surgical/drug-use apparati from the early 1900s to the 1950s.

And that's only the tip of the iceburg. Where'd it come from? My mother collected this stuff. Why? Not really sure. Lots of her lovers were heroin addicts. Maybe it was sentimental? A reminder of who not to love again? A memory of love lost to drugs? Or, maybe her own orientation towards killing the pain with morphine/codine/valium-type anesthetics spilled over into collecting?

Just a heads up to anyone who might be planning to stop by or sending emails to the desktop email (which I can't respond to from my iPhone), I'll be laying low on the Golden Rule front while working on The Occupation of The Settlement until Monday, December 20th, at the very least. If you need to find me, come to the top story of Pioneer Place Mall (the side w/J-Crew, not the side with Forever 21). I'll be there Sunday-Tuesday with volunteers Hannah Spas (Sunday), Rafaella Castaldo (Monday) and Angel Dias (Tuesday), and hopefully not longer than that, but if so, with sweetie boy Navid (Wednesday-Friday) holding me together while I try not to lose it over installing a wall of writing by my deceased mother, MTF, who was pretty intense and stuff.

Originally the plan was to cover the walls of Golden Rule in March with these 1,000+ sheets of yellow legal paper covered in my mother's nightly writings to her boyfriends, many of whom were in prison, spanning the years of 1983-2004. As a child, she always told me these letters were how I'd know her by, that they were her legacy, something to remember her by, something I'd understand better when I was older. The March deadline has been sped up by the last-minute opportunity to present the piece in The Occupation of The Settlement. While I'm not feeling mentally or emotionally prepared for the heavy-lifting of reading through these primary documents, I suppose it's better to get it out of the way rather than dreading it until March. Here goes . . .

I've been bracing myself for this article to hit the press, thinking it may create the biggest PR nightmare in the world for us. Fortunately, writer Riley Hooper was able to cut through my self-deprecating and my tendency to be the queen of TMI in order to share our complicated story in a clear, conscise, and almost 100-percent factually accurate human interest piece. Wow. My hat is off to Riley, as well as to photojournalist Taylor Schefstrom who took some really stunning photos of me and the space.

This article made me really optimistic about the future. I feel like it opens the door towards being slightly more legitimized as a gallery (which we strive to be, what with the providing almost full representation to our artists and all). It also implicitly presents our monthly showcases as the conceptually grounded environmental art that they are (as opposed to retail installation alone). Most promisingly, it didn't tell all. There's still a lot more story here, and hopefully other members of the press will follow suit.

Our neighbors Heather Treadway and Rachelle Waldie have been busy whipping their space into shape for their grand opening, this Friday, November 5th. There will be music, food, drink, dance, and great designs by these lovely ladies!

In a completely unrelated side note, if you like Heather Treadway's 1970s icelandic jacket above, we have like four of them here at Golden Rule this month. As with all things, when my mother found something she liked, she bought it in multiples.

I have been using my mother's old photos as source materials for some small studies painted in 20 minutes or less.

Got those flat file drawers organized. Planning to use some of these old photos of my mother's life as source material for my paintings. In the mean time, if you want to rummage through them, they're here, in the bottom four drawers of our flat files.

The 4-5 hours it took me to organize them took its psychic toll. I'm still not sure I've recovered. There's a lot of beauty and pain in there, and it's very clear how the earlier years lead the way to the latter years (the most painful for me to process, for sure)