I was going to look into the face paint of Ecuador

I suppose you could classify these little pieces as collaborations with my daughter that I can't quite claim as collaborations, since the texts I added to her images make it advisable that I deemphasize the fact that a small child also worked on them.

She can't yet read, but she hasn't seem these drawings since I had my way with them. Leyla made the drawings in a notebook (fashioned by Cat Pick, with a Tarot cover) that we took with us on one of our trips to West Africa. Leyla has visited twice, at age five, and is enviably nonchalant about her relationship with the mother continent.

That would be the mother of all of us, according to the fossil record, not just of Barack Obama and the folks who look like his daddy. Barack's mother, also, was (strictly speaking) an African American, though her kin must have left home a long, long time ago, judging by her skin tone and facial features (God bless the dead).

I found these pieces this week while cleaning up my basement. We are anticipating houseguests from Tallahassee, and I'm also jonesing for a Skuntry Museum mixer - which would require that I transform my basement, away from the junk drawer it becomes between mixers, back into a curated space.

I'm not sure what I was reaching for when I came up with these texts. I seem to have been attempting to be elliptical and mysterious, along the lines of Raymond Pettibon. I've not quit my day job; however; I will be taking a break from it to have a beer and read the other newspapers, right about now.