motto tuesday - in progress, again

agreed.

LANDIS SMITHERS, D.G.A.

just found out, i made the guild. 
i am one of the newest members of the director's guild of america!
moi, little 'ol me, the landis!

not surprisingly,
i love this directing thing.

it speaks to every part of my personality.

the "looking down on people" part of my personality:



the "can you see things my way?" side of my personality:



the "let me ask you nicely" side of me:


the "i only care about appearances" side of my personality:


the "let's try it in slow motion like they do in the credits of law and order" side:


and, of course, the "i'm an artiste" side:



another addition to the life list!

attention hound : the pit bull kiss

i don't know if y'all have noticed,
but ms. avec
LOVES to have her face right up next to ours:

it's a constant. 
she will sit JUST LIKE THAT for ages,
just wanting to feel her face near yours.

i also suspect it's because she loves to make people laugh,
and has found that THIS is a good way to do it:

puppy besos.
da best!

a motto for 9/11 -

seems about right.

let's all try it today, ok?

sara fisher and signs from the universe -

first,
sara fisher comes back from her trip to iceland,
where she rode horses across landscapes that look like something
you made up
in your childhood:

THEN,
you stumble across the horse series that steven klein shot:

and you think:
the universe is sending me a sign.

what is it?

i know.  i need a HORSE!

no, wait.

help, what does the sign mean??

i have a new assistant -

she's checking all my email from now on.

she seems to like it.  and she's a wicked fast typist.

iphone detritus -

it's amazing what you find when you're clearing out the photos on your iphone.

love letters from tim:

goofy eyed grr with green bone:

a black prada dress from two seasons ago, for inspiration, for evelyn:

the home around the corner you'd like to live in:

the "only in the gay neighborhood" grafitti:

the rooftop pool of the london, west hollywood:

the eighteen thousand dollar sofa you lust for,
but put in the category of "things to work hard for/someday/maybe if you win "america's got talent":

the poster in M.A.C. in hayes valley
that you keep resisting tearing down to take home as you walk out:

shoe shopping with tim:

and then you realize,
these are the semaphores of your existence.

the punctuation of love -

dogs have their own language,
it is true.

but i've begun to decipher their code.

they commune with each other in parentheses ( ) :

  

and they rest in quotation marks " :

  

and they live, like we all wish to, in exclamation points ! :

the topography of love -

dogs sleep most of the day.

and still remain so very eloquent.

OUTSIDELANDS : or, why landis is no good at festivals. or crowds.

so,
given that tom was sweating his ass off getting this festival put together,
tim and i really wanted to come see what it was all about.

it's kind of like my fascination with burning man.
i think i want to go out in the desert with a thousand artists for a week and run around in costume doing drugs and generally acting like an insane person. . . but then i remember the dirt.

but we drove to golden gate park,
on a particularly foggy saturday, and parked seven blocks away.

that was an omen.

we did park behind this cute car.  which i took for a good sign:

then we ventured in.
outsidelands is HUGE.  enormous.
and if you're into the kind of outdoor three day venue
with six stages and multiple music acts ranging from . . .
tom petty to jack johnson,
then this was for you.

did i mention there were a TON of people milling around?

this was just the entry.

from above the main lawn,
in a dust cloud,
i began to hyper-ventilate a little bit.

i know!
cute hat, right?

and the height of fashion?

let's say the first sign that the devil is winning
played a large component of people's wardrobes.

what is the first sign the devil is winning?

yeah-huh.

tie-dye.

i would almost swear this was my cousin, eric,
if it weren't for the fact that it was frigid cold, damp, dusty
(i know, dusty AND damp.)
and i was acting too fussy to really take in the details.

tim kept trying to point out the nature:

yes, yes.
large, pretty . . . tree of some sort.
(i've stopped trying to identify nature on this blog since i recently called some large purple flowering thing on our back porch a "hydrangea" and got slapped for it by another blogger.  stupid plants.)
good for you.

but it's not going to distract me from all the stoners twirling in place like religious zealots.

sigh.

at least we went.

i consider it a "life experience".

check.  done.

at least tom knew we went for him.

he even drove me around in his prius.

that IS a prius, right?

how to endear yourself when you are a ten day houseguest -

so when tom porter came to work the outsidelands festival in golden gate park,
he crashed in our spare room for . . .
brace yourselves . . .
ten days.

and amazingly,
we all survived.

we even had fun.  dinners.  some time hanging out.
and no "guests are like fish.  they stink after three days" rule coming true.

perhaps it was that he was gone running cables through the park until all hours,
or that he's so laid back and fun.

but i think he may have figured out
whom in the household you really have to win over
in order to survive:

(the girls do like their tom . . . )