33, yeah baybee!

Damn it feels good to age with a life as beautiful as this!!!!

33 with some of my best friends ❣️

I appreciate getting older because I've learned my hardest lessons, weeded out the phonies, and know exactly what I do and don't care about in this world.

For this next year, I'm working on maintaining more control over my internal dialogue, deeper new friendships, and initiatives to enlighten my community on sustainability and journalistic value🤘🏼 and more skating — lord have mercy, if I don't drop a very sick & ballsy skate vid at 34, please cancel me😤😈😤

Garage mosaic: ¡Bienvenidos!

A year and a half ago, Dusen Dusen posted on Instagram a mosaic in her backyard that Matthew Chambers and friends made and it sort of unlocked a portal of inspiration in my brain that made me feel like I must make an insane and collaborative mosaic immediately !

In our garage, there’s an area that’s going to be the main hangout spot, especially once our backyard is skatable, so it’s a perfect area for an art piece.

Bobby (Dragon Crete) and Clayton poured the slab with a perfect lip to allow for tile, which Brandon and I (and my very-invested-in-this-project friends 🫶🏼) have very slowly designed and laid out.

I've been collecting used tile from Austin Creative Reuse (my haven for all things creative) and Habitat for Humanity ReStore to build up my stockpile, organizing it all by color, and I just finished a little welcome message that will appear on the outside when we install some French doors. It’s a major work in progress and the largest scale project I’ve undertaken. I am an extremely detail-oriented artist and this floor is no exception.

Gravity and Grace

“Even in my worst moments I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else then? Why, for example, a moment in the life of a human being who could have been happy for that moment.”
— Simeone Weil, "Gravity and Grace"

Plastic bricks

My first ecobrick !

Austin has some of the best recycling programs in the country, but I've started to take inventory of the non-recyclable waste (packaging!! styrofoam!!) that cycles through our household and ultimately ends up in the landfill.

On a recent trip, Brandon and I consciously collected every single piece of non-paper waste we used just to visually see our role as consumers in the waste cycle. It's kind of nuts the amount of shrink-wrap and seals and stickers and clips and strings and rubber bands and packaging within packaging the majority of things from a store have.

Anyways, this was really fun to make; it was empowering to feel like I can make my own building materials and when I make my couch, boat, shed it is OVER for corporate America 😤

Dining with an international elite

Michael’s siblings Fran and Hugo were in town for a bit, visiting from England, so it was a great excuse to host our first real dinner party (aside from a Thanksgiving feast we had with Brandon’s parents last year). I love hosting (I mean, I am the daughter of Pam McCaskill — the hostess extraordinaire!) because, as an adult, it feels like such a cool privilege. To invite a select few individuals to come into your home — your sanctuary; your intimate, emotional, artistic manifestation — and to feed them and cater to them and insist that the people you love do nothing but enjoy and experience and imbibe…how cool is that?

So I wanted to seal this memory in painting, which I gave to Michael and Amanda.

Ellie Mae's Smile

Beauty emerges in the chunkiest of spaces

An ode to Tim McCaskill

Link to my dad’s obituary, which I wrote with the research assistance of friends and family.

••••••••••••••••••••••••

My dad passed away earlier this month. He was often difficult, controversial, and unpredictable, but always authentic, interesting, and honest. He was hilarious, brilliantly creative, independent, and seemed to know everybody in Austin from the 70s.

He always did exactly and only what he wanted to do, but included us kids in almost all of it. I grew up at motocross tracks, sitting on top of dumpsters with dirty, dusty feet because he wanted to ride and brought me & Sam along in his van. We grew up in freezing Lake Austin water, riding a piece of styrofoam in the waves for years, because he had a vision of a lakeside paradise and we found our fun in it. We grew up on Jimmie Vaughan, Steve Earle, and Robert Earl Keen because that's what my dad blared from the speakers on his yellow Coronado boat while we hung out of the sun roofs (he'd sit on the roof and steer with his foot) as we cruised down the lake to eat popsicles and run wild at the Pier.

My dad is the coolest guy I'll know. He always made the effort to bond with guys I dated that mom didn't approve of. He was deeply interested in nature and in the last few years we bonded over our independences and shared appreciation for solitude. We could talk politics forever and he seemed to know everything about everything and have the most insane story to share at every occasion. He was a complicated, thrilling individual and Sam, Jess, my mom and I will take years to process his presence in our lives.

"The news never sleeps"

Lately I've been working all day at my job curating news stories and when I get off, working all night on my newsbook, well, curating news stories !

Happy Independence Day!

“Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.”
— Isaiah Berlin

Falling Water house

I’ve found my dream house. Edgar Kauffmann, who owned Kaufmann’s Department Store, called on Frank Lloyd Wright to design a summer home on his property southeast of Pittsburgh. He wanted a space to enjoy nature and to act as a camp for his department store employees. Kauffmann loved the stream and waterfall that ran through the property and hoped that Wright would build the home with a view of the water, but instead the house was designed to essentially hover over the waterfall. Wright used native stone quarried near the home site to build the structure with and even built around some of the natural components. It’s such a dream studio space! I fantasize about curling up next to any of these windows, seeing the green of the trees in my peripheral, and reading, writing, and drawing my brains out!

Here is a link to the original PBS segment and some screenshots of my favorites aspects of the design.

L.A. / Bikini Kill

Christina, Charley, and I visited L.A. for the Bikini Kill reunion show at the Palladium. This is probably the only band I would travel to see once in my life. All of Kathleen Hanna's musical projects (Bikini Kill, The Julie Ruin, Le Tigre) collectively set the tone for my first real creative renaissance when I was 14, locked away in my own world with loud and fast female voices singing at me while I made my own clothes and collages, obsessively studied fashion designers and models, and Ask Jeeves'ed more and more new bands to buy CDs of or download on Limewire (sorry for all the songs I stole, sue me). Bikini Kill was a gateway drug for me with music at a time I felt the most lost and unseen; I saw in them a perfect balance of toughness and anger and confidence with feminity and vulnerability and sincerity. I've never felt like I belonged anywhere, but this music was the driver escorting me to the realization that I belonged in my room absorbed in my projects and thoughts, and also made me feel confident in my presence and not so tiny. I still put on Le Tigre's "Keep on Livin" when I feel scared of the world because it inevitably makes me feel 10 feet tall and full of light.

Anyways. L.A. was a good adventure. We really got acquainted with the tougher side of Koreatown ha ha ha, observed an exuberant nude man marching up the beach, and crossed paths with lots of alien-looking plants because Southern CA can grow literally anything. We were also very cold most of this trip.

I’m sorry for the terrible video. You get the point.

Camping in east Texas

Christina and I ventured east to explore the piney, crow-infested woods of Sabine, Texas. We’ve spent plenty of time in west Texas’ deserts and some friends’ photos convinced me I needed to spend time with the lanky and endless trees on the other side of my state. We had a prime tent spot on the water looking across to Louisiana, spent half a day trying to get to Goober Hill for a pic only to find that there is no sign celebrating such a historic name, and Christina brought sliced beets for a snack.

We also learned that a national forest is not the same as a national park, which was slightly disappointing. No visitor center, no gift shop, minimal signage. A national park’s purpose is for the strict preservation of of the nature, while a national forest seeks to preserve resources but also allows for multi use of the land. We were pretty thrown off when we saw lots of lumber mills and housing on national forest land.

It was a great trip. It always is when it’s just us, our tent, and quiet nature.