Gretchen Ryan - Artist - Little Pretty

Earlier this week I started following Courtney Love on twitter, and man, is she prolific! We are talking 10+ posts per day. Anyways, it's entertaining if you like Courtney Love, which I do. Today she posted: i love this obtuse shit. however i love Oil Paintings of Pageant kids more and so am going w Lachapelle to Gretchen Ryans gallery ! hardon

This made me curious enough to google Gretchen Ryan, who I discovered is an American artist who has painted a collection of portraits of children's beauty pageant contestants. Her paintings are beautiful and inspire in me that same creepy feeling I get from seeing children in beauty pageants. She will be exhibiting her work in New York City this April, and someone has blogged about her in more detail here: http://girliegirlarmy.com/blog/20090313/little-pretty-the-art-of-gretchen-ryan/

In other news, I am excited about the upcoming Metric album. I think it has leaked on the internet, so will put some effort into finding it this weekend. Also, I heard that there will be a new Strokes album out sometime this year which is always a good thing!

Parlour Salon - 6 Ossington Avenue - Toronto

Opening very, very soon: parlour salon ! The brainchild of my wonderful roommate Tyler, his business partner/colourist extraordinaire Franz, and stylists Brionie, Charlotte and Sergio.

As the Now Magazine blurb below says, "parlour will offer a full range of salon services including cuts, colour, student rates, and more. Book now - doors open March 24th".

parlour is located at 6 Ossington, downtown Toronto at the corner of Queen and Ossington, phone 647-345-6663. You can find the parlour website at www.parloursalon.com

(click on the photo above for full size image)

The Norman Elder Museum

From about May of 1994 until the spring of 1998 I lived in what one of my roommates of the day described as "the worst apartment in the best neighbourhood of downtown Toronto"...or something like that. This was part of a complex of eight shabby apartments located at 128/130 Avenue Road above a flower store and an upscale kitchen gadgets store. The apartments were arranged in a sort of Montreal-esque way, with a "courtyard" dividing the two blocks of four apartments. The rent was only $750/month when we first moved in, and there were usually three of us living there at any given time. I met a lot of cool people living in that neighbourhood, and heard a million stories about our mainly off-the-charts rich neighbours. Let's face it, rich people are weird.

One of our neighbours was the eccentric Norman Elder who lived one block away at 140 Bedford Avenue in a large house known as the Norman Elder Museum. Being a semi-recovering goth at the time, I was attracted to his house because of the high wrought iron fence that surrounded the front yard (missing from the picture above), and the Addams Family feel to the place. Though I never did meet Norman Elder, I was told that he was a collector of odd objects, artifacts, stuffed (taxidermied) animals, live snakes, a live tortoise, and so on and so on. David Cronenberg filmed scenes from the movie Naked Lunch in the house. Most of these rumours that I heard also appear on the wiki page that I found recently.

One day when I was hanging out in a coffee shop down on Bloor Street, a cute young guy approached me and asked if i wanted to go with him to visit the place where he lived, the Norman Elder Museum. He described the oddness of the place to me, and told me that I might even be able to move in if I wanted. I was a grumpy and very shy girl at the time, and declined politely, a decision that I regret now. My friend Rene told me that she too was approached by someone and asked to visit the museum, and she actually ended up living there for a spell.

Somebody named Hamish (who lived in the house in the 90s) has a site dedicated to Norman Elder, with a very cool photo gallery: http://hame.ca/norm04/ (the photo above was taken from his site)

and someone else has blog about Norman Elder here: http://www.michaelmurray.ca/blog/?page=news&id=19

Online Dating Adventures

Most of my faithful readers probably do not yet know that I recently signed up at the online dating site Plenty of Fish. About two or three years ago I discovered that my social life, that consists almost entirely of hanging out with 22 year old gay boys, is not conducive to healthy/hetero relationships...as fun as the relationships have been. So, being the proactive individual that I am, I decided to enter into the online dating fray. FYI - I haven't actually been on any dates yet. How have things been going? I will excerpt an email that I sent my friend Daniel about the situation:

oh my god dan....there is so much comedy in online dating, i am practically crying here. today i got two messages in a row from a guy whose picture of himself is of ~a racecar~....~a racecar~!!! like, are girls supposed to think "wow, what a hot guy! looks flashy!" or make the association like "his picture is of a racecar, therefore he must be rich!"??? also, yesterday i got an email from a middle aged man and in his picture he is HOLDING A GUN!!! like yeah, i would feel really safe going to meet you. maybe we should meet in the wooded area next to the abandoned mental asylum.

the other thing is that i have already run into my ex-boyfriend on plenty of fish, and another guy i know who used to have a crush on me years ago! so much for anonymity!!

Anyways, I will keep you posted about any more progress I make, or comedic scenarios I encounter. P.S. Erin - don't try to figure out which ex-boyfriend (though pretty obvious) and which ex-crush!!