feather2pixels

More letterpress! So far, my two strongest impressions of printing on a press are related:

I gave a little five minute survey to my students on Friday. I do this kind of thing occasionally because I never have any idea how effective I am. But also, there are always comments like this and I love them:

I’m suddenly one those people with not enough time. That in itself wouldn’t be so strange if it weren’t for the fact that, just a few weeks ago, I was fully embedded in the opposite circumstance. Now, I’m writing to-do lists and falling asleep at nine thirty on Friday nights.

But no matter: the postcard (film) project is done!

Well, almost done. Nowell is going to comb through edit #26 on his own to fix the few shots that still bother him, which will probably resemble something like airbrushing out someone’s pimples from a satellite photo (another reason to love collaborating with him). Wow: when we started this project, Nowell was single, I was still in grad school, and nobody knew who John Edwards was. Now Nowell is a married homeowner, I teach the classes, and John Edwards has his own bus. Look at this soundtrack:

We will have all four glorious minutes in streaming Quicktime for your video iPods in no time.

In parallel, I am screen printing a set of postcards for the Castro Street Fair, which takes place at the world’s gayest intersection this October. My art friend, Adrienne, two of her art friends, and I are setting up a booth to sell stuff. This will be my first official set so I am going to try extra hard. My goal is to make fifty sets of twelve San Francisco postcards, all stuff south of Cesar Chavez St.—a continuation of the “anti-San Francisco postcard” theme. (Oh God, if I ever put an art idea in quotes again, please punish me with, um, a week of nothing but reading A.P. Democratic primary articles.) Here are two of the photos I’m printing from:

Oh, and letterpress: I began my first printing workshop a few weeks ago. You know, like Gutenberg-style. If my screen prints bored you, well, prepare for a whole new way to be underwhelmed that you didn’t realize existed. But this stuff is cool. It makes me think intently about words and, to a greater extent, letters. And not just semantics, but the physicality of letters: typefaces and spacing and the way you can turn commas into apostrophes or quotation marks.

Maybe you kind of have to be there. The first night we were pummeled with a comical barrage of 500 years worth of esoteric vocabulary (“hold your composing stick flush with the galley in order to avoid pied type and then tighten the quoin [with the quoin key, of course]”). There are even the letterpress-originating idioms (e.g.: because a “sort” is an individual piece of type, you are “out of sorts” when you run out of e’s). Anyway, it’s still all quick foxes and lazy dogs. Every person in the workshop contributed three lines to the first exercise. I had the Garamond 18:

Another great photo booth shoot, taken with the outstanding unit at The Knockout, after Thursday night Bingo. I especially like the second one:

I’m back from the teaching conference for engineers. No more pretending: now I am teaching for real.

I wish I could say it was going well, but it feels like everything else right now. You know, time and space collapsing into a tar-like substance that is virtually impossible to remove from cotton. Words come out of my mouth but I barely hear them. I certainly don’t control them. I am numb to everything going on around me.

I feel like I am losing my sensory perception. I can’t hear people on the phone, I misread words in magazines that I never needed glasses to read before, and my memory feels like the old butter knife you never use because it’s too dull, even for a butter knife.

Somehow, my students put up with it all. Some of them could even be described as bright eyed and eager and, in this way, they amaze me. I’m hoping their patience will outlast my derusting.

I’m in San Luis Obispo, the most annoying to spell place in America. School sent me here to attend a teaching workshop for engineers at Cal Poly. What is a teaching workshop for engineers? Great question. A teaching workshop for engineers is a type of prison where people who are good at intonating their voice spend three days trying to convince engineering professors to look up from their Power Point presentations. Oh it’s not even that bad–I happen to strongly believe in all this bullshit and appreciate what these people are trying to do–but why do these things need to descend into self parody so quickly? Why is someone ever insisting on receiving my attention to tell me that “getting [students] to remember is hard, but how many kids know every word to the rap music?” Jesus!

At least I get to observe myself teaching on tape (or rather, I will so when I muster the courage to put my pride where my mouth is and watch it) and at least S.L.O. is a lovely place to visit. I am staying with Tom the Historian, from cruise, and tonight he baked beets and pork tenderloin while the central coast breeze circulated through his antique apartment.

Also, cruise was no fluke: that dude drinks like no tenured professor I know.

Speaking of To-shi-O, that guy has been talking about building a critical mass bike-stereo, practically since I have known him. It finally debuted on Friday.

There are plenty of bike stereos at any given critical mass, the most ambitious of which are powered by car batteries, toted around in carts, and audible from a block away. Sonically speaking, competing with those fuckers is a fool’s errand. But it’s a huge mass with plenty of room for riders with more modest arrangements, like To-shi-o, a little guy with a big dream to share his playlist with the masses–his indie rock alternative to burning man techno.

With the enlistment of Alfonso, who works in a professional sign shop, the project took on a new level of ambition. Mostly, the stereo ended up looking a lot slicker than I ever imagined, complete with vinyl decals and an iPod holder. Also, I was impressed that the thing ran off of eight AA batteries and used sheets of foam core to amplify the sound (the same way a homemade speaker works with a paper plate: move larger surfaces of air, get more sound). The excitement before the ride was palpable:

The Death Byke Stereo turned out to be a lot less loud outside, surrounded by rush hour traffic. I wouldn’t call it inaudible but, beyond a one bike radius, the Go Team definitely faded into the ether. To-shi-o was pretty disappointed: as a personal stereo it was brilliant, but he obviously had his sights set on bigger things. By the ride home, though, he was already brainstorming modifications and I admire his determination.

And the night wasn’t all defeat. We ran into Sylvia (from the Exploratorium), who helped us finish our water bottle of Jim Beam and who afterwards invited us East (Death Byke Stereo: satisfyingly loud in the BART station). People in the East Bay seem to be fascinated with life, death, and decay and in this way Sylvia’s place might be the most quintessentially East Bay apartment in the history of Oakland. It’s a vortex of plants, composts, found/made furniture, and quirky little messes. After a night of vegetable pizza and homemade beer, To-shi-o and I decided that it ruled.