Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Skeletoncrew's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, June 29th, 2008
2:40 pm	Because I want a distraction The "Big Read" thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below. 1) Look at the list and bold those you have read. 2) Italicise those you intend to read 3) Underline the books you LOVE. 4) Reprint this list in your own LJ for fun! 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (I hate Jane Austen.) 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Okay I've only read half.) 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible --still reading 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare --why are these lumped together? I've read quite a few, but not all. 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 34 Emma - Jane Austen 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel 52 Dune - Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding 69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses - James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal - Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession - AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte's Web - EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo Could someone tell me why there is no Mark Twain on this list?! And why are "the complete works of Shakespeare" and "Hamlet" separate? Current Mood: amused Current Music: "I Robot" The Alan Parsons Project (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
4:19 pm	News from the world of Liv We currently have long mice which is a reliable indicator that it is too hot. That aside I'm currently working on my Etsy sites. Ossabelle.etsy.com is now devoted exclusively to supplies including a selection of the Oregon Sunstone we dug on our honeymoon. My photos aren't all prefect but I'm rather proud of how well I've done photographing such tiny little gems with my not-exactly-professional grade camera. I've also started a new Esty site devoted entirely to my smaller prints and jewelry. It is still in the works, but please take a look at: Raineysmith.etsy.com for www.livraineysmith.com, I still need to get get into Dreamweaver and build a proper site. I've been focusing on getting the sunstone online but now that I have a decent selection of it on Etsy it is time to shift my focus back to my art. As for my art, my lingering cold has kept me out of the studio, but I have been working on a 4x6 woodblock, and contemplating a few other new projects. Current Mood: chipper Current Music: "The Naked Robot" Alan Parson's Project (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
1:13 pm	Show reminder My final student show is now up at: Hoffman Gallery Oregon College of Art and Craft 8245 Sw Barnes Road Portland, OR 97225 Reception from 4-7pm The show is open through June 22nd from 10am-5pm daily This show features work that was completed as part of the thesis process, but not displayed at the thesis show. Three of my prints are there for your viewing enjoyment. Current Music: "Aladdin Sane" David Bowie (Comment on this)
1:44 am	I need a favor from someone in the UK According to the news section of www.davidbowie.com : "David Bowie is the subject of an upcoming Mail On Sunday cover-mount CD in the UK. But, rather than follow the usual format, David decided to select twelve of his own favourite Bowie recordings. Called iSELECTBOWIE, (see above) the twelve track CD contains a brand new re-recording of Time Will Crawl. Here's what DB says about this new version of the track which was originally a 1987 single release from Never Let Me Down... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Time Will Crawl (MM Remix) Produced by David Bowie. Recorded & mixed by Mario J McNulty. String arrangements by Gregor Kitziz. String Quartet: Martha Mooke/Krista Bennion Feeney/Robert Chausow/Matthew Goeke. Drums: Sterling Campbell. "There are a host of songs that I’ve recorded over the years that for one reason or another (clenched teeth) I’ve often wanted to re-record some time in the future. This track from ‘Never Let Me Down’ is one of those. I’ve replaced the drum machine with true drums and added some crickety strings and remixed. I’m very fond of this new version with its Neil Young of Shortlands accents. Oh, to redo the rest of that album. One Saturday afternoon in April 1986, along with some other musicians I was taking a break from recording at Montreux studios in Switzerland. It was a beautiful day and we were outside on a small piece of lawn facing the Alps and the lake. Our engineer, who had been listening to the radio, shot out of the studio door and shouted, ‘There’s a whole lot of shit going on in Russia.’ The Swiss news had picked up a Norwegian radio station that was screaming for anyone who would listen that huge billowing clouds were moving over from the Motherland and they weren’t rain clouds. This was the first news in Europe of the satanic Chernobyl. I phoned a writer friend of mine in London but he hadn’t heard anything about it. It wasn’t for many more hours that the story started trickling out as major news. For those first few moments it felt sort of claustrophobic to know that you are one of only a few witnesses to something of this magnitude. Over the next couple of months a complicated crucible of impressions collected in my head prompted by this insanity any one of which could have become a song. I stuck them all in ‘Time Will Crawl’. That last sentence rhymes." - David Bowie 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We'll post one or two more of David's song annotations ahead of the Sunday 29th June publication date, when you will be able to read his comments on all twelve of the following tracks which make up iSELECTBOWIE. 01 - Life On Mars? 02 - Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing 03 - The Bewlay Brothers 04 - Lady Grinning Soul 05 - Win 06 - Some Are 07 - Teenage Wildlife 08 - Repetition 09 - Fantastic Voyage 10 - Loving The Alien 11 - Time Will Crawl (MM Remix) 12 - Hang On To Yourself (From David Bowie - Live Santa Monica '72) That's what I call an impressive introduction to David Bowie's music. Then again, DB has always had remarkably good taste when it comes to other people's stuff, so why not his own? This coming Sunday, a week before the Mail On Sunday publishes iSELECTBOWIE, there will be a Bowie feature in the Mail On Sunday Live magazine." They've linked to: http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/ , but I don't see anything there about getting physical versions, and it sounds like it is an actual CD bundled with the Sunday June 29th issue. Suffice to say, I want it. I don't have many contacts in the UK though, so if you or someone you know has access...I'd love to get a copy (I can reimburse via Paypal, or make some sort of trade). I'm a sucker for new tracks and Bowie tends to do a fantastic job when he re-imagines his own music. So, anyone able to hook me up? Current Music: "Sound and Vision" David Bowie (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
1:27 pm	Opening tonight! My final student show opens today at: Hoffman Gallery Oregon College of Art and Craft 8245 Sw Barnes Road Portland, OR 97225 Reception from 4-7pm The show is open through June 22nd from 10am-5pm daily This show features work that was completed as part of the thesis process, but not displayed at the thesis show. My main work on display is "Daath Elohim," though I believe a couple of my older works are up as well. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
11:39 am	Leftover lamb suggestions? We have been given about 5lbs of spit roast lamb. I'm not sure what the cuts are, I see a couple long leg bones in the box as well as some large chunks of meat. I've only cooked lamb once in my life (my mom never liked it so I never had it growing up), so I'm not quiet sure what to do with it. Google yielded some left over lamb curry recipes, but curry tends to make me feel ill. Anything involving cheese is also out unless I can make non-cheese portions. I'm thinking I might be able to toss it in a stew or soup, or maybe something like pasties, but if any of you lovely folks have advice as to what works well with lamb, I'm all ears. Current Mood: amused Current Music: "I Can't Read" David Bowie (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 18th, 2008
4:39 pm	Oh by the way... I got my BFA yesterday. Finally having that diploma in hand was almost overwhelming. Or maybe it was just heatstroke. ;) I'll be taking it easy the next couple days then getting down to the business of just WHAT THE HELL DO I DO NOW?! (Don't worry, I do have ideas and leads etc. Just gotta get to it and see where the cards fall.) Current Mood: ecstatic (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 9th, 2008
10:08 am	Still in the works, but live www.livraineysmith.com is up. For the time being it is just a portfolio of my thesis work, but it will grow into a proper artist website once graduation is over (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 5th, 2008
1:08 pm	OCAC Thesis Exhibition The Four Portlanders of the Apocalypse have been unleashed upon the city! OCAC Thesis Exhibtion at Worksound 820 SE Alder Portland, OR May 5-27 Gallery hours: 12-5pm Monday - Saturday Reception: May 16th 4-7pm (Note this event is likely to be extremely crowded and may not be the best time to spend time looking at the art -- but if you want to meet the artists we'll be there.) Liv's gallery sitting: Saturday May 24th 12-5 (I'll be helping watch over the gallery this day, so if you'd like to view the work while I'm there to answer questions, this is your opportunity.) Also, my postcards should be arriving today. If you're already on my mailing list expect yours by the end of the week. If you're not on my mailing list and would like to be, please send your snail mail address to: Liv.raineysmith@gmail.com Current Mood: excited (Comment on this)
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
6:52 pm	I did it! I successfully defended my thesis. I got some extremely positive feedback. I feel very good. (Understatement of the year.) More later. Current Mood: jubilant (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
1:06 am	Saint-tastic I've been watching the fuss in Italy over Padre Pio with some amusement. I had first read a few months ago that there was a fight over whether his body should be exhumed and displayed at all, and now it looks like the naysayers lost. I'm no expert on saints but I thought that one of the criteria was that the body be "incorruptible" The fact that the body is being displayed with a mask would indicate to me that Saint Pio isn't holding up so well these days. (Incidentally, I can't help but notice that the two news stories and one photog allery I've looked at on yahoo all describe the mask as being made of a different substance. Latex, wax, or silicone. Well which is it? Inquiring minds would love to know what materials the Church artisans are using to make this saint look life-like. Oh wait, this has a ring of accuracy to it: "A team of forensic specialists, doctors and a biochemist worked to restore the body for Thursday’s ceremony. A London company that supplies figures for wax museums created a special silicon mask to represent his face, complete with beard and bushy eyebrows." Hmmm...interesting work if you can get it!) "Bishops and priests were among the first to view the body, many using cell phones to snap photos. Nuns standing to one side of the coffin said prayers. Padre Pio is also big business, and business in this rustic region of southern Italy has been hurting. Numerous hotels built after Pio became a saint six years ago have gone bust, and a mayor was convicted of absconding with funds. Today, city fathers and church officials are hoping the renewed reverence will boost the economy. " The circus atmosphere doesn't surprise me one bit. Bishops and their churches have a long colorful history of stealing "relics" from each other to attract more pilgrims, so what is a little exhumation, preservation, and enhancement in comparison? Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: "People Are Strange" Echo & the Bunnymen (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
8:30 pm	The word of the day: Done. My thesis body of work is done. Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: "Oh! You Pretty Things" David Bowie (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 18th, 2008
12:13 pm	Thesis update Yes! I am still alive! I'm in the last couple weeks of work right now. My paper is due in a week, and all of my art must be completed a few days after that. I'm feeling really good about it all, I just have to keep putting in long days for a while and pray I don't get one of the colds (or flu) my fellow students keep bringing to school. I've got an appointment to get my prints photographed next Wednesday, and I might have my metal piece done in time (it is coming along beautifully) as well! I'll be producing a postcard featuring one or more of the photos. So if you'd like to receive a card, please e-mail me your name and address at Liv.Raineysmith @ gmail.com Please note, while I will not be selling your address to anyone, I might happen to make more art in the future and make more postcards...which I will then mail to you so you can see what I'm up to. So if you want to thwart my evil scheme to conquer the world via art, you'd best not give me your address. Current Mood: excited Current Music: "Electric Barbarella" Duran Duran (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
12:37 am	Mmm...Bowie To support the completion of the recording studio at The Institute for the Musical Arts, David Bowie contributed an autographed leather jacket from The Hunger television series, which he hosted in the late 1990s. Up for bidding now! (Comment on this)
Friday, April 4th, 2008
12:43 am	You Tube video from my birth year Current Mood: chipper (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
4:06 pm	Sneak peek P1010144 Originally uploaded by LivRS Here's a little peek at my thesis prints...and no I'm not posting more until the show. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
5:47 pm	Why hello there! Me Originally uploaded by LivRS I've been documenting my work in progress, and snapped this last week. This particular piece of bronze won't be making it into my thesis work due to some changes in how I'm constructing the piece, though it does illustrate just what I'll be doing for the next 3 weeks...drilling holes and sawing, sawing, sawing. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
4:56 pm	As of 1:30pm today... My printing is DONE. Done! Done! Done! All that is left to do is let them dry a few days, then select what goes into the edition, sign, number, frame, and the photography. Mind you, there is still the bronze piece I am making for my thesis, as well as the paper, postcard, presentation, oral defense, and gallery show. But getting these prints done is a huge weight off my shoulders. I've been working on them since last November and there are so many things that could have gone wrong at many stages, but they didn't. Oh, and the prints look fantastic! Current Mood: awesome (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 24th, 2008
11:29 pm	Mailing list One of the things I'll be doing as part of my thesis is producing a postcard featuring one or more of my thesis pieces. I am compiling my mailing list now, so if you'd like to be on it please e-mail me your name and address at Liv.Raineysmith @ gmail.com Please note, while I will not be selling your address to anyone, I might happen to make more art in the future and make more postcards...which I will then mail to you so you can see what I'm up to. So if you want to thwart my evil scheme to conquer the world via art, you'd best not give me your address. Current Mood: amused Current Music: "You Can Call Me Al" Paul Simon (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
9:15 pm	Corteo Hey Portland folks, I know some of you have seen Cirque du Soleil a time or two, do you have a recommended time for arriving before the show? I know the doors open an hour before the show, should we be getting there that early or more like a half hour before? I don't want to feel rushed getting to our seats, but I also don't want us to be bored beforehand. Current Mood: exhausted (2 Comments |Comment on this)