tamera documented the garden tea this weekend. i took some pictures too, find them below. my rss feed is messed up for picture galleries and extended posts right now, which makes me sad, but i haven't had a chance to fix it. so if you're reading a feed, click through for photos and the rest of this post, which has some shit about the tarot! and i promise i'll fix the rss feed soon.

because tamera is amazing, she got me the Aquarian Tarot for a present. i love this tarot deck and have been obsessing about it. i don't know how i feel yet about its divinatory or symbolic properties. i haven't even done a reading with it yet, i've just been marveling at the 70s art deco insanity of each card, especially the major arcana.

at tea, we compared some of the cards to the rider waite deck, and thought about how Palladini had changed the symbolism, or not, in some cards. in general, we noticed that faces are quite wispy and inconsequential in this deck, and wondered what to take from that.

also, to me, it seems like the colors aren't as saturated as they should be (i've actually added saturation in the scans below), and i really wonder if that has to do with the quality of the printing done by US Games, who publishes these. i would love to see an original version of this deck from the 70s, but i have no idea where i would find it. if anyone knows where to look for such things, by all means, email me.

i am glad that jenny ryf over at catalyst posed about the aquarian tarot. she's how i found it. i was googling for Palladini and magician, trying to find images of David Palladini's OTHER tarot deck. as she says about the magician card: "Thanks Magician, let's translate ideas into action. I also like how you look like you could be in Jefferson Airplane."

i could not resist scanning a few of the most astonishing cards in the deck. here they are:

...

in other news,

recently, i have been fascinated by the Bohemian Club and Bohemian Grove. i blame that partially on the big article about Bohemian Grove in Vanity Fair this month. sadly, the article is kind of a let down. it starts out with intrigue and darkness, but it fizzles out into some vague concern that maybe something bad is happening or maybe not, and a lot of rambling about forestry paperwork. BUT, anyone who has walked by the Bohemian Club's clubhouse in downtown San Francisco should also become fascinated, at the very least because of the of the spooky plaque on the building.

and, my sutro tower tattoo is itchy and peeling and leaves flakes of itself in places like BART, my bed, and the office floor at work. this is gross, i guess, but whatever. there's something good about it, too.

on wednesday, as i was leaving the house to go get a root canal, yoko had a small seizure. so i rushed her to the vet and cancelled my root canal.

she is fine. there is a small chance it may have been cardiac related but one more test is required to know for sure. i don't know what to say. she's getting older. for the last few years, she has looked after me and protected me in her cat ways. she has laid with me while i recovered from surgery, protected me from difficult roommates and boyfriends, and laid with me during the endless breakup tears of 2008. now i feel like it's my turn to take care of her, or at least, the beginning of the time when she'll need that from me more than she has. i've been walking around feeling like everything is very fragile.

Sunday cascaded into more coffee, a donut, chores, and just now, migrating all of my old posts from swinney.org into elly.org.

In the early part of this (omg, nearly over) decade, swinney.org was a galvanizing force amongst a certain group of internet pals. we all wrote there, and commented on each other's writing. it was a group blog of sorts. it was where drama played out, too. it was the site to reload in search of action in the pre-social networking days. if you go look at it you'll notice that the "thoughts" are sort of like twitter. swinney was before its time!

i'm still good friends with most of the people that frequented that site. and, amazingly, i'm still kind of proud of my writing on swinney.org. or at the very least not desperately embarrassed by it, which is not always true of older stuff from here. it's not like anything i'd write now, of course, but i particularly like this post where i transcribed the results of a "what career is right for you" test from high school, and this post about climbing through my neighbor's window.

There's no real reason to move these posts into my own site except for my intense dedication to archiving every little thing. Did I tell you that I'm thinking about becoming a librarian? That's on the career test results, actually. it lists 'archivist.'

the "office" is really just an apartment in oakland.

tonight on icb, james pasted: She considers the camera a phallus, comparable to ray guns and cars, which are "fantasy-machines whose use is addictive".

[00:51] <shadok> what is it about feminist theory that slowly drives
[00:51] <shadok>  intelligent women loopy?
[00:52] <le> that question....
[00:52] <le> seems so fucking loaded
[00:55] <shadok> so you would agree that a cameria is an addictive fantasy
[00:55] <shadok>  machine, just like a "ray gun"?
[00:55] <le> yes, actually
[00:55] <shadok> i see
[00:55] <le> i'm addicted to mine
[00:55] <le> i'd also like a ray gun
[00:55] <jh> same

also, i just caught myself annotating my own private journal with... thoughts on my thoughts. good christ. it always starts out with "oh i'll just re-read this bit before i save the month's journal..." and next thing i know i've created footnotes to myself. when is it time to worry? when my footnotes have footnotes? when i've got a cache in my cache so i can read while i read?

So I went to see what was tagged 'amazing' in my delicious and found this so here you go, it's one of the covers from the intercommunal newspaper published by The Diggers in the 60s. It was called Kaliflower. This post at thenonist.com has more.