Backtalk: Art Hop, Chip Haggerty, Chris Hurd, Hannah Dennison

AT THE HOP: The annual Art Hop is a little like Halloween: You get tricks and treats with that festive feel wandering door to door in the dark. Good thing there were maps at the art amble last Friday. And winners — the event juxtaposes the casual approach of “open studios” with a juried boxcar show. Chip Haggerty of Stowe snagged first place for his outsized “book” on bedsheets. “No one has ever read it,” the artist confessed while viewers flipped through the quilted pages — a two-person job. “Palm Tree Papers” is definitely an obsessive work. But does Haggerty consider himself a frustrated artist or a frustrated writer? “Both,” he said with glee. “I was originally coming from a reading and writing place.” When no one took notice, “I decided to jazz up the book.” Laid out on adjoining army cots, this textural tome has a sleeping bag for a dust cover. Meanwhile, the “people’s choice” award went to Burlington sculptor Chris Hurd for a headless leather-clad hero with an eagle head in place of a penis. With meticulous attention to detail, Hurd manages mythology and irreverence with a figure that would make Donatello proud. More women than men noticed the missing member, which was erect on the floor at the end of a long tail. Equally eye-catching were the works of second-place-winner Jude Bond — delightfully sculptural constructs around kitchen stuff and selected cucurvits — and eloquent photographs of India by Elizabeth Messina.

FREEP STYLE: Covering culture for the Freep is no picnic. Too many festivals can drive an arts writer to, well, keep on driving. Susan Kelley has better reasons for leaving her job at the Burlington Free Press for “those islands that look like dots, at the end of the world.” Around mid-October the 29-year-old arts writer will leave Burlington for Southeast Asia, India and Nepal, where she plans to “read books for weeks and weeks on end.” She will not miss the daily grind — only the chance she might have gone skiing this winter with Spalding Gray. “Things are going pretty well here,” she explains. “I just want to see the jungle.”

IN BRIEF: Rob Breszny is not a life-or-death astrologer. His tangential horoscopes are more atmospheric than advisory. Nonetheless, in astrology, timing is everything. For the record, Brezsny’s recommendation to compulsive Virgos not to alphabetize their spices was meant for last week — not the week before, when the horoscope appeared in Vox. Details, details . . . “The California of New England?” Somebody is working overtime in the self-promotion office at Burlington City Hall. Last Sunday the Boston Globe ran a puff piece on Burlington that made us sound more like a destination on the “We Are the World” tour than a grown-up lumber town. Great publicity, but “unrestrained ethos?” Even the off-key tunes of Richard Haupt came off cuddly. . . . The Mill Project has gotta be a tough act to follow — Hannah Dennison went beyond the call last spring with her week-long performance at the old Winooski Woolen Mill. Her next project is smaller, but no less historic. Dennison is seeking performers for a site-specific piece at the Rose Street Bakery — soon to be transformed into an artists’ space. Dennison describes the venue as “very funky.” The work, by the way, is about bread. . . . It’s hard to imagine Burlington feminist Peggy Luhrs at the U.N. Women’s Conference in Beijing. Between the veiled and the Vatican, the conference is turning out to be about as earthshaking as a Tupperware party. But Luhrs showed up last week on CNN — albeit for a nanosecond. Burlington Step-Up director Leigh Steel also got some international exposure in footage of a demonstration. The narrator described the gathering as a “radical group of vegetarians.” Way to go, girls.