What I must say first about the show “Amish Abstractions: Quilts from the Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco is GO TWICE. There are quilts from the Amish communities of Lancaster, Pa., and Holmes County, Ohio. Most were made before 1940. A couple pieces are completely insane. Old Maid’s Puzzle (maker unknown) c.1930 from Holmes County, Ohio has a black circle in the center like a dilated pupil. The pattern uses small blocks bisected by curves to send a ripple out from that center point that looks like a diagram of radiation spreading out from a toxic event. Or, to read into the name of the pattern – a diagram of the fear of single girls. As with any established pattern, it’s the particular rotten sherbet palette of this piece that makes it scary. Also see a five-star version of Tumbling Blocks with a black and cornflower blue border, where the blocks are lit with lavender light coming from two directions at once. It makes you want a stabilizing drink, now. Clean living does weird things to people. Check it out.

Last night I saw Aurelia’s Oratorio at Berkeley Repertory Theater. This is one of those rare things that is both light and heartbreaking. Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, the creator of the show and the mother of its star, is Charlie Chaplin’s daughter. Uncle Dan actually hooted “Pure Chaplin!!” in the middle of one piece where two dancers + pair of pants = three dancers. It’s a dance vignette collection with puppets, spare props and some aerial gymnastics (drapes with hidden ladders, gymnastic rings hidden inside hanging silk shirts). There are low-key special effects, mostly having to do with black and white cloth knocking out or obscuring something tipped this way or that under the light. The all-vintage aesthetic is judiciously defanged by using a little electronic music here and there; in an old alarm clock bell chorus there is one pesty modern alarm clock. Victoria T. Chaplin and her husband started the cirque nouveau movement which people credit as the inspiration for Cirque du Soleil. This is not as fancy as Cirque de Soleil. It has a sneakier and more modest heart. Marcus just about spoiled it by asking in the parking garage, “How come every piece of French whimsy MUST include tango music? They can’t get enough of it.” Maybe somebody can explain that.

Last night I went to see Robin Ekiss read from her new book of poems The Mansion Of Happiness at Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley. (“The Mansion of Happiness” turns out to be the Victorian precursor to the “The Game of Life.”) The poems mine her weird upbringing by miniaturists. She explained with a reasonably straight face that there was a dollhouse in every room in her house, including the bathroom AND the garage. This could be merely creepy, but Ekiss uses the tiny rooms inside rooms she grew up with to locate us each precisely and uncomfortably in our slice of a slice of genealogical time. It’s not all dollhouses. Ekiss told a story in the Q&A about being dragged outside one morning by Will Oldham when they were at the Headlands residency together. He was wearing a bright orange sweatsuit to go with his big orange beard, and wanted to show her a beehive which had a swarm of bees hanging from it — and then she wrote, “like bees bearding the wall/of a hive..” Oh!

Has anyone found anything really worth looking at on Ebay lately? If so, please share. Here is a commemorative (not sure in what spirit, exactly) 9/11 disaster rug from Afghanistan. Bidding has ended for this one, sorry. I’m just keeping it in my “watching” pile. Today I found an interesting woodblock print of two dead fish in a basket by Kyosai, c. 1880. The auction runs for 1 day and 6 six more hours, as of this posting. Also see two ducks tearing apart a striped lizard in the same folio. I like the background note supplied by the seller: ” Kyosai studied as a child under Kuniyoshi. He was greatly influenced by the work of Hokusai as well as rice wine (sake) which he consumed in large quantities.” How do you cut a woodblock while drinking? The guy must have been really good.

Swiss artist Ingo Giezendanner’s beautiful new zine for Nieves Books is called Baku & Back. Ingo G. made the drawings on a cultural exchange trip he took from Switzerland to the Caucasus. The cultural exchange part didn’t work out but we get to keep the drawings. The amount of white paper left between the lines might have an inverse relation to amount of caffeine in the artist’s bloodstream. Coffee-fired or not, his enthusiasm for looking and drawing is contagious. Ingo says, “This is my statement to go out, see the world and avoid airplanes.” What timely travel advice!

Everything looks good in Glitter Pony, actually. Glitter Pony is helping us all figure out how to read more poems on the Internet, in this case using Dixieland funeral style graphics. They also sell T-shirts on their associated site, A Mystery in Common. Looks like a pretty decent poem-supporting business model. Check it out.

Hoa Nguyen @ Article: Art and the Imaginative Promise