Apple has this new feature on iTunes, iPhone, iEtc called Genius. The Apple website says

Say you’re listening to a song you really like and want to hear other tracks that go great with it. With a few clicks, the new Genius feature finds the songs in your library that go great together and makes a Genius playlist for you. You can listen to the playlist right away, save it for later, or even refresh it and give it another go. Count on Genius to create a mix you wouldn’t have thought of yourself.

Turns out it is perfect for my sadsack, generally suck-filled life. This is the playlist I just got after selecting Divorce Song by Liz Phair.

• Liz Phair - Divorce Song
• Yo La Tengo - Autumn Sweater
• Neko Case - Deep Red Bells
• The Pixies - La La Love You
• Pavement - Gold Soundz
• The New Pornographers - Letter From an Occupant
• The Afghan Whigs - My Curse
• Sleater-Kinney - Oh!
• Cyndi Lauper - When You Were Mine (Prince Cover)
• The Mountain Goats - This Year
• Neko Case - The Needle Has Landed
• Pavement - Spit on a Stranger
• Yo La Tengo - You Can Have It All
• Sleater-Kinney - Modern Girl
• Ryan Adams - Burning Photographs
• Lemonheads - Confetti
• Pavement - Cut Your Hair
• Neko Case - If You Knew
• Liz Phair - Never Said
• The Mountain Goats - Love Love Love

An hour+ of tunes for me to sulk by! Thank goodness for whatever miserable motherfucker algorithm the smarties at Apple came up with. Thanks Genius!

Are you freaking kidding me? Bitch needs $40K by October 15th to stay afloat. This is a travesty. If my checking account wasn’t currently overdrawn $115, I’d be sending them some skrill right now. You know I’ll be heading over to their donation page when pay day rolls around.

Molly Mayhem gave me my first issue of Bitch in late 2000 (Issue #11). I was floored. Smart, funny, modern feminist commentary on all that pop culture I can’t help but be in a very complicated love/hate relationship with. I subscribed shortly after and have renewed my subscription every year since. It is actually pretty surprising a magazine as smart, poignant and unapologetically feminist as Bitch has survived this long. Let’s not let the old girl down.

Please, please, please let there be enough change hanging around at the bottom of my purse to buy a cheap bottle of wine from Trader Joe’s on my way home from work.

I’ll be teaching an Amigurumi Workshop at Boston’s new (and awesomely cute) handmade clothing & gift store, Oak, on Sunday, June 8th from 1:00 to 3:00 PM. Cost of the class is $50 and includes materials. Contact Oak proprietor, Keara, to sign up at bostonartisans (at) gmail (dot) com or 857-362-7311.

I’ve been taking a beginning drawing class on Monday evenings at the adult education center where I teach crochet. This past Monday, for some reason I was in the crankiest mood ever, totally hulking out. So I decided to skip class and go home to hide under my comforter instead. On the bus ride home, I glanced at the open Metro the woman next to me was reading and caught a blurb about fashion designer and winner of the first season of Project Runway, Jay McCarroll. I totally love this dude, personality- and design-wise, and often watch a youtube of his Project Runway Bryant Park show to cheer myself up. Since I’m just coming out of hermit-Christina mode (see this post) after a dark winter, I had no idea that 1. there was a documentary about Jay McCarroll, 2. it was playing the 2008 Independent Film Festival of Boston, 3. Jay McCarroll and the directors would be doing a Q&A after the screening that night.

Now I am the reigning champ of making up excuses in order to avoid leaving the house unless totally necessary (like in order to prevent starvation). But somehow I caught a second wind, shoved some tofu scrambler in my grill when I got home and left the house for David Square. Go me.

Eleven Minutes follows Jay through a year where he designs and shows his first line, Transport. Contrary to the illusion that Project Runway creates that you win and suddenly become <Heidi Klum voiceover> “America’s next top designnnnnner” </HKVO>, Eleven Minutes attempts to give you the real deal about what goes into a fledgling designer’s first line. McCarroll has talent, charisma and humor coming out of all sorts of orifices. I could have sat there and watched two more hours worth of Jay-vision. You can’t help but want everything to go smoothly for Jay through the film (it does and it doesn’t)! But there wouldn’t be an interesting film in the mix if everything did go smoothly for him though. Eleven Minutes is a love letter to the creative process and all the highs and lows that go with it. He is able to pull off a really cohesive and beautiful show of his line, but doesn’t get the sales that he was hoping for. (P.S. it was absolutely terrifying to see what it’s like to navigate an industry I may be peripherally involved in some day.)

After the film there was a Q&A with directors Michael Selditch and Rob Tate and McCarroll, who met during Project Jay, a one hour special for Bravo on what Jay was up to after his PR win. I got some okay pictures of Jay, but none of the directors, who were both wearing really excellent Jay designed items. Jay McCarroll has a line coming out this fall on QVC. Sizes of items will range from XS to 3X!!

So there are two Christina Kara’s. And now I’m not talking about myself and NYC-based wedding dress designer, Christina Kara. I’m referring to the two sides of the Somerville-based amateur craft broad, Christina Kara. AKA me. One part is busy-Christina. She has a demanding full-time job in a joint department of a New England health insurance company and a prestigious medical university that rhymes with Smarvard. Then she has a fun part-time job she recently began as a coffee/sandwich lady at True Grounds. She also teaches people some of the crafts she knows how to do. These things take up time! Then there is hermit-Christina. When she is not working, she is often found laying in her luxurious bed, watching episodes of TV shows on her laptop and drifting in and out of sleep, thinking about all the things she SHOULD be doing instead of being a lazy fuck. Her best friend… Okay, I’m going to switch away from talking about myself in third-person because it’s clumsy. My bestie, J Silk, was visiting last weekend and I couldn’t even force myself to clean up the disgusting tableau of sloth and self-loathing that is my bed. Thick books about handspinning and fiber/color theory are piled upon a tower of Ms. and Selvedege magazines. This pile was contagious and had spread onto the side of the bed where I don’t sleep. On top of the magazines was an empty cup of vegetable soup, a dirty spoon, an empty muffin cup, and the tinfoil from two tacos I had for dinner from Olecito the night before. Laying suspiciously near that stuff were two vibrators (not just 1, but 2!!!) in a sea of muffin crumbs and my laptop. To the untrained eye, the person that sleeps in this war zone spends the majority of their time eating sloppily, masturbating to internet pornography and laying in their own filth. But I’m not really like that! I swear. I just hadn’t been able to bring myself to clean up the weeks of life detritus that had built up. So I showed Jess the appalling scene, we had a good laugh and then quickly cleaned it up while she settled in. Since then I’ve resolved to stop eating in bed, to spend less time paralyzed by the fear of failure and start taking my prescribed antidepressants more regularly in order to murder hermit-Christina. I hope this leads to more posts!

Jenny Holzer pencils. Purchased at MASS MoCA 2/29/2008.

A few weeks ago, I took a hand dyeing class at Mind’s Eye Yarns in Porter Square. Hand dyeing yarn, besides completely awesome, is… involved. At least with washfast acid dyes it is. I’m not really familiar with kool-aid dyeing or jacquered dyes.

They’re dyes so you have to wear gloves, cover every surface that you don’t want Pollocked in newsprint and plastic wrap. They’re toxic so you need to wear a dust mask and have a whole set of different dyeing accoutrement (pots, kettle, tongs, steaming trays) that can’t get mixed up with regular kitchen stuff that you want to eat out of without killing major brain cells.

This hasn’t stopped me from thinking about it obsessively and setting up my own hand dyeing studio in my mind. I took the first step last week by placing an order with Pro Chem & Dye. In addition to the Winter Holiday 6 Dye Sampler (which comes with citric acid crystals and small bottle of Synthrapol), I also ordered a swatch of all the Washfast acid dyes they carry to help get me thinking about color stories for yarn once I get all of the necessary dye stuff together.

Last week I drove to North Adams, MA (the furtherest northwestern corner of Massachusetts for those unfamiliar with our great state) for work. My job usually entails a whole lotta sitting in a messy cubicle, writing IRB amendments, reconciling grant financials. So getting paid to drive 3+ hours, set up recording equipment and tent cards for a focus group and stay in a posh hotel room with a fireplace was an incredibly welcome change. As a bonus, I was invited to take Friday off to enjoy the Berkshires.

North Adams is also the home of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). Awesome. MASS MoCA is currently exhibiting Jenny Holzer’s Projections (through Fall 2008) and a very large collection of Spencer Finch’s work entitled “What Time is it on the Sun?” (through Spring 2008). Doubly awesome. Honestly, I know very little about fine art. I do know that both of these exhibits are top notch.

Projections… what can I say? She’s fucking Jenny Holzer! This is her first interior light projection installation in the US. And it’s a doozy. Luckily there’s a video of the installation and a webcam broadcasting live when the museum is open. I have to say, it’s a poor replacement for seeing it in person. I also scored a few of her “truisms” pencils, which I’ll post pictures of when I get home.

Then there was Spencer Finch exhibit, including a few installations created specifically for MASS MoCA. It blew. my. fucking. mind. Finch’s work deals heavily with color, memory, perception, and the passage of time. My favorites were Trying to Remember the Color of Jackie Kennedy’s Pillbox Hat (1994), 102 Colors from My Dreams, Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004) (2004), CIE 529/418 (CANDLELIGHT) (2007), West (Sunset in my motel room, Monument Valley, February 26, 2007, 5:36 - 6:06 pm) (2007) and Abecedary (Nabokov’s Theory of a colored Alphabet applied to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) (2004).

The only problem with seeing such a amazing exhibit is that I couldn’t take every piece home with me. But then it turned out I could because MASS MoCA was selling a beautifully put-together monograph of the whole show.

I’m a crafty working broad on the move which, unfortunately, results in a purse that looks like this. I reach in for a pen and pull out a DPN instead. I try to pay for a coffee and get tangled up in excess yarn. I pull out my datebook and forty crumpled print-outs of project instructions flutter out along with it.

So when I asked Jen, of the sewing team Piddleloop, to whip up a project bag for the birthday of one of my besties, I also ended up getting one for myself. I can’t wait for them to show up in the mail. The first is for my friend and the second is for myself.